Our showers on Monday afternoon are still waiting for an encore. Traveling east to Lusaka from Mongu, I noted how little maize had yet germinated in the fields along the way; the heavy rains have yet to set in, so farmers are accordingly holding off planting maize.
I reflected on that the other day as the guard and I were planting the maize in my spacious back yard ... you have no idea whether it will or won't rain in the upcoming days. There simply is no weather forecasting; ZNBC has a meteorological report that is almost laughable in their vagueness; they tend to use expressions like "it will rain in places in Western Province" or "very warm in Western province", as if sandbagging will reduce their culpability. To their credit, though, the ITCZ moves almost on a whim and the horse latitudes can end up over our heads.
The eight hours on the bus have become something of a routine. Today, the seat had a broken back, so I spent the entire ride leaning back 45 degrees. The ubiquitous kid-on-the-lap-of-a-mother spent much of those eight hours grasping at my temple or pressing his feet against the back of my seat, much to the bemusement of his mother, who refused to believe that the seat was broken. Don't really pay any mind anymore ... I read the summer edition of Lapham's Quarterly, which was themed around the sea, with the presence of mind to skip past the pictures that would appear (or are?) pornographic to a Zambian, such as The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (look that up yourself) or Ulysses straining against his bonds to join with the scantily clad Sirens.
Periodically, as is my wont, my gaze would remain fixed on the landscape out the window. In the 400 miles east to west, the forest and soils change imperceptibly on the course but notably on the extremes. You leave Mongu, a beach without an ocean, and arrive in Lusaka, islands of rock surrounded by a sea of garbage. In between, you phase agriculturally from cassava interspersed with maize (Mongu / Kaoma), to maize interspersed with tobacco (Kaoma East), to maize interspersed with cotton (Mumbwa). Cotton is deceptive ... untrained eyes mistake the scratch lines for CA basins.
At the end of the journey, I rolled aching off the bus into the melee of Lusaka's Intercity bus terminal, resembling a mobile version of Lot's wife. I went straight to the office to discuss the upcoming meetings next week with the World Bank, NEPAD, and NORAD to form a CSA alliance; my hope is we can shift the conversation from scaling-up (i.e., adding beneficiaries in a stochastic way) to adoption analysis, with a focus on graduating farmers through progressively more technical aspects of CA. Shopped a bit for food; grabbed a burger (to satisfy my Western cravings), came home and wrote up a case study for the annual report. "Watched" (via CBS.com) the sportsticker of Michigan's last-minute loss to Ohio State (why did they go for 2?). Type blog. Rest.
Saturday, November 30, 2013
Thursday, November 28, 2013
Grateful Year #10
Been trying my hardest to forget it's Thanksgiving, and work helps; my staff is scrambling around trying to get the demo plots going in each of the project areas, monthly reports are due (which means I make a lot of phone calls and emails to people who forget each month just how long a month is), and I'm flying down to attend a big Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) conference in Johannesburg on Monday. It would be pretty blase (a lot of sitting, listening, and swapping cards after awkward conversations over poorly mixed cocktails), if not that I am representing my agency in a select group of NGOs (somehow named the "Big Five") to some awfully large actors on the global development stage. Programme reviews the following week; coordinating a motorcycle safety training; case studies; field visits (where I get to be the bad guy to poor performing extension workers); urban demos; M&E training; IPM training; partner agreements.
Maybe I won't miss Christmas.
On my way home from work last night around 21:30 (9:30 p.m.), I bought two boiled eggs from a 8 or 9 year old boy who doubtless had to come with an empty carton. Last night I dreamed that the rains didn't come; I woke this morning upset over that (rain's in the back of your mind all the time in my line of work), itching the mosquito bites on the soles of my feet and thinking of home.
It's time for the grateful list, i.e. what I'm grateful for:
Happy Thanksgiving.
Maybe I won't miss Christmas.
On my way home from work last night around 21:30 (9:30 p.m.), I bought two boiled eggs from a 8 or 9 year old boy who doubtless had to come with an empty carton. Last night I dreamed that the rains didn't come; I woke this morning upset over that (rain's in the back of your mind all the time in my line of work), itching the mosquito bites on the soles of my feet and thinking of home.
It's time for the grateful list, i.e. what I'm grateful for:
- Not being broke. I was broke for a long time and it's hard.
- Mollisols/Ultisols. America has some of the best soils in the world. I wonder what the pioneers would have done if they came rolling over the Appalachians and found Kalahari sands in the Ohio Valley.
- Running water. Frequent bucket baths make functioning showers the greatest thing in the world.
- Health.
- Fresh food nearby.
- The neighbors. They are just about the nicest people and the kids speak Lozi in short sentences very loudly, usually in a descriptive manner about whatever's happening ... helps with learning.
- The guards. They do a lot of stuff without too much instruction.
- Cell phones. I used to talk to Mom & Dad once every three or four months and it was like the line was made of gold. Now it's whenever the both of us are awake and it's cheap.
- Old Crow Medicine Show. Chug along.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
An October to forget
It's somewhat inexplicable but our rains have commenced quite a bit early this year. The evening before Independance Day (Oct 24th), we had a shower that finally broke the back of the crazy heat that dominated most of the prior two weeks. We've had a few showers come through; enough to green up the garden noticeably and induce the weeds to start poking their evil heads above the sand.
I'm of two minds about rain like this; on one hand, it wakes farmers early out of the stupor due in no small part to the heat that characterizes late August through (usually) mid-to-late November. This will get farmers "on-the-jump" prepping their fields; on great downfall of most Zambian agriculture is late preparation that turns into late planting which is agronomically a big hit to maize yields.An early rain also helps us greatly; our system of minimum tillage (where we dig small basins in rows at regular intervals to microdose inputs, and into which we later plant seed) becomes that much easier when the sand wets up a bit. Otherwise, digging basins in dry sand is a bit of a Sisyphean task.
On the other hand, the early rains serve as a reminder as to how far behind our project is; we were forever getting a confirmation of monies, hiring new staff, procuring transport (motorcycles), sensitizing communities, selecting seed growers, etc., etc., etc. (Let's just say we'll not dwell on the hell of October or September). It's work; it's usual. You just try to roll with the punches.
Would give anything to shake the dry hack that afflicts the heads and tails of the day; not sure if it's the drop in the temps (to which I would gladly suffer much greater ills) or the profusion of plants that have blossomed in the past week. Or to shake the blues; having trouble with what I believe is familiarity and what I'm sure is loneliness. Some of the perks of the adventurous overseas life ...
I'm of two minds about rain like this; on one hand, it wakes farmers early out of the stupor due in no small part to the heat that characterizes late August through (usually) mid-to-late November. This will get farmers "on-the-jump" prepping their fields; on great downfall of most Zambian agriculture is late preparation that turns into late planting which is agronomically a big hit to maize yields.An early rain also helps us greatly; our system of minimum tillage (where we dig small basins in rows at regular intervals to microdose inputs, and into which we later plant seed) becomes that much easier when the sand wets up a bit. Otherwise, digging basins in dry sand is a bit of a Sisyphean task.
On the other hand, the early rains serve as a reminder as to how far behind our project is; we were forever getting a confirmation of monies, hiring new staff, procuring transport (motorcycles), sensitizing communities, selecting seed growers, etc., etc., etc. (Let's just say we'll not dwell on the hell of October or September). It's work; it's usual. You just try to roll with the punches.
Would give anything to shake the dry hack that afflicts the heads and tails of the day; not sure if it's the drop in the temps (to which I would gladly suffer much greater ills) or the profusion of plants that have blossomed in the past week. Or to shake the blues; having trouble with what I believe is familiarity and what I'm sure is loneliness. Some of the perks of the adventurous overseas life ...
Sunday, September 29, 2013
A September to Remember
We're having an odd (?) spat of wind and lightning. I have so long been blissfully ignorant of the contents of the sky above that upon leaving the office this afternoon, I revealed in the usual shock one gets from seeing clouds when so long without.
That's not quite right ... I was home for most of the month of August following my birthday and the CARWG conference, and it rained plenty a couple of times. However, I have so perfectly separated the here from the there that vacation seems as if it happened to another person. Simon & Garfunkel weren't kidding when they said "Michigan [and Indiana and New Orleans] seems like a dream to me now."
Back in the here, September has been somewhat ludicrously sweltering; by the time I got back to Mongu on the 8th, temps were starting to hit 35C; yesterday, it finally topped 40C. For the audience back home, that's 95F up to 105F. It is a dry heat, thank God ... and the nature of the soil causes most of the heat to radiate up and out an hour or so after dark. However, this large shoddily armored knight sleeps mostly on top of the bed's dust cover, alternating between fitful dreams of the Lake Superior shoreline and sweaty wakefulness staving off the ever-present specter of regret.
Eventually 5:15 rolls around about the same time I'm finally dozing off; the cell phone alarm ding-dongs a number of times before I roll out and mash the keypad trying to silence its blaring. Such a chump now ... used to roll out of bed instantly awake; now I feel like a tottering fool in the morning, unable to find my bathroom slippers (flip-flops) and stumbling barefoot to the bathroom. After hauling on my shorts and a t-shirt, stretching, I wake the guard from his deep slumber on my porch and head out for training.
Any time someone in Zambia is running with shorts and a t-shirt, people refer to it as "training" ... there has to be a point to running, such as an upcoming football match, or, ermmm, a football match. No one runs to lose weight in this culture; why the hell would someone not want to be fat? I plod along and think of little other than the fire in my lungs and avoiding the invariable gentlemen steering their bicycles home to the village with the rolled up corrugated steel sheet strapped perpendicular to the long axis of his bike. Or the taxis, which believe they'll get better mileage if they don't turn on their lights. Or the Chinese ...
Ah ... the Chinese. I've not touched that hot-button topic much since I've started this blog. The Chinese are in Mongu for the same reason many Chinese are in Zambia or Africa as a whole: they are building something. In our case, it is a dual project; repair of the roads around Mongu town, and the road across the floodplains connecting Kalabo on the Angola border to Mongu, the rest of Zambia, and sensu stricto or otherwise, the rest of the world. The former is happening in a circle around my house, and as is their wont, the Chinese get the crews on the road early and keep them working late. It's been wonderful for the already staggering colloid levels in the air; their is a constant aura of dust that at times makes people appear as spirits emerging into and fading out of view. Most of the dust comes from their hauling clay out of Mawawa pan 14 km east of town in long, jolting convoys of Dong Fang tipper [dump] trucks and taking it out into the Barotse floodplains to build the roadbed.
Knock down those pronouns; "their" in this case is mostly China Geo's (the company's) local hires; it seems an essential element of this sort of work is to hire tons of guys at cheap wages; if you quit, there is always someone else who wants to purchase skinny jeans and soon-to-break oversized headphones who can lean on a shovel with the best of them. However, real Chinese employees are not few, and totally unlike most NGOs do not bother with the assumption or pretension that nationals will do the job. Each job has a Chinese supervisor somewhere, typically smoking, donning a boiler suit, and wearing a straw hat with an oversized brim (hence my disaffection of such haberdashery ... I got tired of kids calling me a Chinese, using the racial epithet "cho-choli", or shouting "shey-shey-shey-shey-shey" at me). One cannot figure how they supervise lacking either English or siLozi, but they accomplish much with pointing and shouting things like "you work!" or "you dig".
I can't wait for October to go by ... we need the washing badly.
That's not quite right ... I was home for most of the month of August following my birthday and the CARWG conference, and it rained plenty a couple of times. However, I have so perfectly separated the here from the there that vacation seems as if it happened to another person. Simon & Garfunkel weren't kidding when they said "Michigan [and Indiana and New Orleans] seems like a dream to me now."
Back in the here, September has been somewhat ludicrously sweltering; by the time I got back to Mongu on the 8th, temps were starting to hit 35C; yesterday, it finally topped 40C. For the audience back home, that's 95F up to 105F. It is a dry heat, thank God ... and the nature of the soil causes most of the heat to radiate up and out an hour or so after dark. However, this large shoddily armored knight sleeps mostly on top of the bed's dust cover, alternating between fitful dreams of the Lake Superior shoreline and sweaty wakefulness staving off the ever-present specter of regret.
Eventually 5:15 rolls around about the same time I'm finally dozing off; the cell phone alarm ding-dongs a number of times before I roll out and mash the keypad trying to silence its blaring. Such a chump now ... used to roll out of bed instantly awake; now I feel like a tottering fool in the morning, unable to find my bathroom slippers (flip-flops) and stumbling barefoot to the bathroom. After hauling on my shorts and a t-shirt, stretching, I wake the guard from his deep slumber on my porch and head out for training.
Any time someone in Zambia is running with shorts and a t-shirt, people refer to it as "training" ... there has to be a point to running, such as an upcoming football match, or, ermmm, a football match. No one runs to lose weight in this culture; why the hell would someone not want to be fat? I plod along and think of little other than the fire in my lungs and avoiding the invariable gentlemen steering their bicycles home to the village with the rolled up corrugated steel sheet strapped perpendicular to the long axis of his bike. Or the taxis, which believe they'll get better mileage if they don't turn on their lights. Or the Chinese ...
Ah ... the Chinese. I've not touched that hot-button topic much since I've started this blog. The Chinese are in Mongu for the same reason many Chinese are in Zambia or Africa as a whole: they are building something. In our case, it is a dual project; repair of the roads around Mongu town, and the road across the floodplains connecting Kalabo on the Angola border to Mongu, the rest of Zambia, and sensu stricto or otherwise, the rest of the world. The former is happening in a circle around my house, and as is their wont, the Chinese get the crews on the road early and keep them working late. It's been wonderful for the already staggering colloid levels in the air; their is a constant aura of dust that at times makes people appear as spirits emerging into and fading out of view. Most of the dust comes from their hauling clay out of Mawawa pan 14 km east of town in long, jolting convoys of Dong Fang tipper [dump] trucks and taking it out into the Barotse floodplains to build the roadbed.
Knock down those pronouns; "their" in this case is mostly China Geo's (the company's) local hires; it seems an essential element of this sort of work is to hire tons of guys at cheap wages; if you quit, there is always someone else who wants to purchase skinny jeans and soon-to-break oversized headphones who can lean on a shovel with the best of them. However, real Chinese employees are not few, and totally unlike most NGOs do not bother with the assumption or pretension that nationals will do the job. Each job has a Chinese supervisor somewhere, typically smoking, donning a boiler suit, and wearing a straw hat with an oversized brim (hence my disaffection of such haberdashery ... I got tired of kids calling me a Chinese, using the racial epithet "cho-choli", or shouting "shey-shey-shey-shey-shey" at me). One cannot figure how they supervise lacking either English or siLozi, but they accomplish much with pointing and shouting things like "you work!" or "you dig".
I can't wait for October to go by ... we need the washing badly.
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
Thirty-seven and Car-Wig
Today is my birthday. I am celebrating with pecan nut bread and peppered cheddar, something I couldn't imagine back in the great Zam.
I'm in Pretoria (Centurion to be exact), South Africa today up to Thursday for a meeting with the CA Regional Working Group, or CARWG "Car-Wig". CARWG is more or less a the vehicle by which country programs in Eastern and Southern Africa get together and "share" CA experiences. The quotations (or as they're known down here, inverted commas) come from the difficulty we have sharing experiences across such a vast area. To whit ... the country's represented at this plenary (Zambia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, and Malawi) are for the most part the size of 8.5 times the state of Texas.
Fly across Texas sometime (or drive, though that is a heart-rending). Consider how different East Texas is from West Texas, then multiply that by 8.5 ... you'll get the picture.
Anyway, I won't comment on that. The area is mind-blowing (as is every trip I've made to RSA); you can't imagine the development. Indicative of this is the rare ability I exhibited of dozing off in the back of the car taking us from the airport to the Protea ... the roads are that smooth. RSA (at least these parts) resembles something like the Beltway region around D.C., albeit with far more wall fences, electrified or razor wire, and with an apparent plethora of security guards. And the "cold" (again with the inverted quotes) puts ours to shame.
Not much else to mention. Strange society relative to north of the Limpopo; seeing whites in "common" jobs (cleaning up, busing tables, etc.) is odd. Not in the mean way; just something you forget in Zambia. The tourist literature is something off the planet as well, reflecting the duality of history hear. The hotel website refers to the Voertrekker Monument as either "an historical landmark" or "a grim reminder of the apartheid era". It also refers to the monument as being just outside of Pretoria, with the alternate name of Tshwane appearing in parentheses. This doubling of history lingers, reminding me (though to a lesser extent) of the names of Civil War battlefields differing between the Blue (rivers) and Grey (towns). Antietam / Sharpsburg; Bull Run / Manassas; Stone's River / Murfreesboro; etc.
I'm in Pretoria (Centurion to be exact), South Africa today up to Thursday for a meeting with the CA Regional Working Group, or CARWG "Car-Wig". CARWG is more or less a the vehicle by which country programs in Eastern and Southern Africa get together and "share" CA experiences. The quotations (or as they're known down here, inverted commas) come from the difficulty we have sharing experiences across such a vast area. To whit ... the country's represented at this plenary (Zambia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, and Malawi) are for the most part the size of 8.5 times the state of Texas.
Fly across Texas sometime (or drive, though that is a heart-rending). Consider how different East Texas is from West Texas, then multiply that by 8.5 ... you'll get the picture.
Anyway, I won't comment on that. The area is mind-blowing (as is every trip I've made to RSA); you can't imagine the development. Indicative of this is the rare ability I exhibited of dozing off in the back of the car taking us from the airport to the Protea ... the roads are that smooth. RSA (at least these parts) resembles something like the Beltway region around D.C., albeit with far more wall fences, electrified or razor wire, and with an apparent plethora of security guards. And the "cold" (again with the inverted quotes) puts ours to shame.
Not much else to mention. Strange society relative to north of the Limpopo; seeing whites in "common" jobs (cleaning up, busing tables, etc.) is odd. Not in the mean way; just something you forget in Zambia. The tourist literature is something off the planet as well, reflecting the duality of history hear. The hotel website refers to the Voertrekker Monument as either "an historical landmark" or "a grim reminder of the apartheid era". It also refers to the monument as being just outside of Pretoria, with the alternate name of Tshwane appearing in parentheses. This doubling of history lingers, reminding me (though to a lesser extent) of the names of Civil War battlefields differing between the Blue (rivers) and Grey (towns). Antietam / Sharpsburg; Bull Run / Manassas; Stone's River / Murfreesboro; etc.
Monday, July 29, 2013
Good Things Come in Threes!
Last Monday on the heels of a horrible day in Lusaka that involved a visit to the post office (2 hours), Northmead for a meeting with other agencies over Conservation Agriculture (2 hours), Makeni [CAMCO] where I was testing a not-so-efficient rice grader whilst arguing with the manager over the lack of quality (1 hour), pulling my hair out in Mt. Makulu trying to get the prices for pre-basic (foundation) seed (1 hour), and practicing nose-breathing whilst in the car stuck in Lusaka traffic (?? hours), I came back to the office after 6 p.m. to find out that I have had a paper published in the Journal of Agricultural Sustainability that is somewhat eponymous with the URL of this site. I tip my hat to my adviser, Dr. Bill Bland, on that one ... it was his persistence that kept the paper alive. I need to get a copy to the host family back in Monze (which I just realized I haven't visited in 1.5 years ...)
Tuesday was even better ... Accenture agreed to fund phase II of the CA programme in Zambia and Malawi, doubling it's funding amounts to $3.2 million for another three years. It's really exciting as it means I have a job past February next year (*** A brief aside ... one of the worst parts of development work is that your jobs aren't neither long-tenured or secure. ***) It is the culmination of about six months of project concept notes, proposal writing, budgeting, etc., etc. Real team effort on that one between our guys in Dublin, Malawi, and here.
Sunday, I bought a rice cooker (ironically the same Sunbeam (C) model I owned in the States; purchased it from Game in Lusaka, owned by Mass-Mart, owned in turn by Wal-Mart ... flattening world indeed). That seems really blase, but it really cuts down on the soupy rice.
Tuesday was even better ... Accenture agreed to fund phase II of the CA programme in Zambia and Malawi, doubling it's funding amounts to $3.2 million for another three years. It's really exciting as it means I have a job past February next year (*** A brief aside ... one of the worst parts of development work is that your jobs aren't neither long-tenured or secure. ***) It is the culmination of about six months of project concept notes, proposal writing, budgeting, etc., etc. Real team effort on that one between our guys in Dublin, Malawi, and here.
Sunday, I bought a rice cooker (ironically the same Sunbeam (C) model I owned in the States; purchased it from Game in Lusaka, owned by Mass-Mart, owned in turn by Wal-Mart ... flattening world indeed). That seems really blase, but it really cuts down on the soupy rice.
Sunday, July 28, 2013
Greetings my few readers!
Here is an example of what we refer to as a political (and economic) agroecological context.
Slightly over two months ago, the Zambian government (for reasons that remain a well of speculation) entirely dropped the subsidies on fuel and cut the subsidies for maize production / consumption. It was greeted at first with confusion that soon turned into anger, particularly with the 15% jump in fuel prices. The Zambian economy, including the small-scale farmers who are still consumers of things like sugar, cooking oil, clothes, etc., etc., suddenly saw their costs jump 20% literally overnight, as everything in this country depends on fuel. This was abetted in no small part by the fact that every can use fuel prices as an excuse to squeeze out some more profit, particularly as the chain from producer to consumer involves on average, four or five exchanges of goods (manufacturer -> regional wholesaler -> local wholesaler -> rural trucker -> retailer [tuck shop] -> consumer).
The maize subsidy reduction didn't kick up that much ruckus; however, my suspicion is that the cuts to FISP (Farmer Inputs Support Programme) won't be recognized until much closer to the farming season; oh, how will people holler when they have to pay half (rather than a fifth) of the price.
Anyway ... suddenness of the announcement caught everyone off-guard (including the government representatives, who appeared not to know about it). The sudden bump in consumer prices got everyone buzzing, and their was an order issued for government ministers to explain the reason for the reduction in subsidies; it is claimed that the money freed up will be used for rural development.
As a guest in this country, I don't cross some lines of discussion, particularly in a public forum. I can say though that in my past experiences working around FISP, maize production and purchase subsidies have created a forcing context that seems to discourage crop diversification; this is particularly acute in the areas (esp. the current region, Western) that I've worked in that are marginal at best for maize production; to whit, our district average maize yield in Mongu was 0.38 t/ha ... that is like planting two football fields to maize and getting 8 x 50kg bags. To put that in context, farmers in Iowa achieve something like >8t/ha; even commercial farmers here achieve 5~6t/ha. Farmers grow maize due to it's historically monolithic support by the government, and any move away from that is a step in the right direction. Mark my words ... it will be a shock to the agricultural system of Zambia as significant as an ecological event.
Below are scans of the leaflet released two weeks ago (the English version and the Lozi translation).
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