Bio-char Correspondence, A

Hi D -

I've heard your name a billion times because many Zambians tend to think all Americans know one another; however I am familiar with your work with XXXXXX/ XX XXXX and have eaten your peanut butter and breakfast cereal very often. My name is Carl Wahl and I work for Concern Worldwide in Western Province heading up the Conservation Agriculture projects in Mongu, Kaoma, and Senanga (plus many new districts we're not sure of yet). 

I would love to hear more about your bio-mass / charcoal project. Are you trying to do distributed or centralized production? We (NGI, CeLIM, and myself) are working on various ways to make cheap and clean sources of charcoal; NGI and I are more interested in bio-char as a soil amendment because of our incredibly sandy soils; CeLim through Caritas and the Mongu Diocese are looking for ways to make sustainable charcoal. 

Currently, I'm been banging around with a TLUD system using a very slightly modified 55 gallon drum. Great if you have a uniform product of sufficient size to ensure airflow (e.g. bamboo or pigeon pea stems), but I think you'd need some forced air and a good draft for things like rice husks / sawdust. The big thing with smaller diameter feedstock is that it's hard to get good combustion of the gases driven of by the pyrolysis ... without that, you get a very smoky (and GHG-wise a very dirty) burn. 

Another thing I'm likely going to pilot at Kasisi in the next month or two is a double-drum system, e.g. a smaller diameter drum filled with feedstock upside-down inside a 55-gallon drum; in the airspace between the drums, you pack in a dry fuelsource that "bakes" the feedstock in the inner drum, eventually flaring off the volatiles in a relatively clean process. However, you need to gather additional biomass to get the process going. 

One thing we have identified for sure with the CeLim folks: making briquettes from bimass feedstock using an extruder and then making the charcoal hasn't worked very well, as the charring process weakens the briquettes and makes a lighter density, cold-burning (relatively) product. We'd like to figure out a way to make the char first, crush the char, mix with an adherent (e.g., shredded and boiled cassava), and then extrude.

Blah-blah-blah. Would enjoy meeting up with you sometime and chatting about what worked in XXXXXXX province as we did some of the same stuff in Senanga. 

Best,

Carl 

Life Yamene

(This post was written on January 22, 2014)
In Kaoma this evening; I got lucky on the way over this morning, picked up some Zambezi truffles. No kidding, we have truffles in Western Province and they are by their very nature the aromatic expression of a place I might have ever known. It's as if the sum of all the odor of this blasted xeric sand is condensed into a baseball-sized sphere of ... well, the words fail me, as it is too dense to be a mushroom. However, I'm certain that without a doubt should I travel across the universe, that smell would temporarily return me to Western Province.

Returned from a miraculous vacation in Kenya over the Christmas / New Years' Holiday; it gave me an opportunity to reflect (over numerous Tuskers and Whitecaps) on the life yamene.

"Yamene" is usually found twice in the Zambian colloquial repertoire, fortunately doubled on the waxed paper packs containing what is likely (by volume) Southern Africa's favorite drink, Chibuku ... the naming of which is another story. Chibuku is otherwise known as "Shake Shake", an indication of the action necessary during the consumption of the 1 liter "pack" to stir the chunky contents (ground maize) back into the liquid. "Yamene Yamene" is, as far as I can tell, the chiNyanja translation. Hence, life yamene ... "life shake" or as I prefer, "the shaken life" (to hell with figuring out the past perfect tense for Yamene).

So, "the shaken life" is one where you sometimes live outside of yourself in order to mentally withstand being in a faraway place for the long haul. I.e., constantly being a foreigner and/or stranger in a society; being the subject of what my friend Oliver Shao often referred to as positive racism; having a language capacity equivalent to looking through dirty glass; gastronomic monotony that reduces appetite to a somewhat distant and oft-ignored longing; the capriciousness of weather; seeing people (particularly children) who are desperately hungry working for a plate of cassava that has the nutritional value of paste; repeatedly reminding people not to repeat the same mistake; the distances from family, stoplights, good ice cream; aging; loneliness; the dog dying over New Years'; etc.

In response to the life yamene, you cope in strange ways. I pulled weeds for an hour after I found out the dog died, for example. Slash grass around the school conservation agriculture demo plot in 90F weather. Making bio-char when it's 110F (the feedstock gets very dry). Any repetitive task involving your hands (shelling seeds, making Teren ropes (to mark where to dig basins), etc.). Reading Guns, Germs, and Steel for the 38th time. Drinking beer whilst cheering on West Ham United. Drinking beer whilst crying over West Ham Utd.

The point is you try to stay out of your head in order to get things done, because it tends to be a big echo chamber up there of regrets, second-guessing, doubts, etc. Peer in, run it only on problems, set the great engine to working, then duck out. Psychologically, it's likely not healthy ... but psychologists are in short supply, and people have much worse problems. Hence "life yamene" ... and "Tarnished Armour".

The Quickstep

I'm still puzzling out whether it was a bug or some bad food ... wouldn't be surprised, as we had a workshop at the Hollywood Lodge out on the east edge of town early last week. Anyway, my intestines have been twisted in knots for three days and, well ... you know how that goes. Or maybe you don't. Diarrhoea (diarrhea to the Yanks) in Zambia is brilliant opportunity to explore the deepest depths of your soul. Whatever particular bug has infested my guts, it is the kind that causes the roughed-up joints and spots w. muscle tension to sing like they were packed with shredded glass. As such, the middle of my back, my right knee, both shoulders, and my neck took turns screaming at me. I alternated between laying on my bed, then on the floor when it got too hot, then sitting in a chair, repeating every few hours with bathroom breaks. 

If you haven't caught it by now, expat workers (particularly those of the RPCV variety) find solace in relating their bodily functions because frankly, the tropics and the developing world teach you the frailty of life in the face of about 6,000,000,000 ways to die. What was it in The Snows of Kilimanjaro ... the main character died for want of a bit of iodine.

The other thing dying fast around Mongu are the crops. We're now 15 days into our second dry spell of the year, and the maize is looking pretty far gone. It's not been a great year for the project ... Conservation Agriculture is climate-smart, but not climate-proof. Still, we missed some opportunities not being on time with planting due to our late start. Our extension workers are notorious for sitting still until they have seeds on hand, which given our late start date (late Oct. / mid-Nov. in some cases) we didn't get the seeds out until the later date. Then half of them planted straight in standing weeds, compromising the vital early growth of the plants, then weeding weeks later ... consequently, half of everything was spindly and easily attacked. 

Excuses, excuses. I just realize I will need to run like a demon this year when we take on 3,000 beneficiaries.

February 02, 2013

I've given up on snappy names for my blog posts, as my brain is relatively slow today ... in the office staring at a computer program (Great Plains) that my agency uses to manage our financial accounts. Long before I was the white in increasingly tarnished armor, I was a computer programmer with a bit of background in user interface (or UI, better known in the Android ~ app era as G[raphical]UI or "gooey"). Therefore, I feel somewhat entitled to pronounce that the UI / GUI for Great Plains software, known as FrXDrilldown, is a piece of excreta on the CAFO scale ... you can't get details behind budget lines without fishing into every single individual line. It reminds me of ice-fishing ... some guys simply drill holes in straight lines hoping to find the honey hole but mostly end up wasting time and making a lot of noise.

Oh well. It's work. Which is comme ce, comme ca this time of year. We have a great lot of new community-based field extension officers (FEWs) who need constant attention from our district extension officers (DEOs) who aren't able to provide said attention due to a) their lack of motorcycle licenses, b) their lack of motorcycles (most are currently stuck in Lusaka awaiting Interpol clearance thanks to HQ's decision to run an international tender); and c) nobody plays the bad guy during the site visits (more on that later).

The big issue is that we had early rains in October ... enough to get the grass growing; it then stayed fairly dry throughout November. Consequently, most of our FEWs dug their basins and planted into grass, opting to weed later. Much later ... half the maize and sorghum we saw on my field visits looks spindly due to it's growing up half-shaded. I scratch my head and grumble, look at the ground, and act (well, I am) really disappointed. I listen to the usual excuses, then quietly tell the FEW that if they want to continue being a FEW and receive a monthly allowance, they will never let me see another weed in their field again. Then I leave with the team wondering what the hell they do when they do make a visit w/o me. It's unfortunately unsurprising ... Zambians are notoriously non-confrontational to the point of never wanting to make anyone feel bad, so the fields go unweeded.

Oops! Drilldown has found an unbalanced line! Nope ... it crashed again. Later ...

World AIDS Day

Today is World AIDS Day (WAD). There isn't much going on because of the day; pulling people out of church (or bed) for the standard get-your-themed-Tshirts-on-and-march-behind-a-banner parades to celebrate, much like International Women's Day, Labour Day, Independence Day, Farmers' Day, etc., would go over like a fart said church. 

I didn't do much for the day; got up early, ran, went to church (whenever I'm in Lusaka on a Sunday, I try to attend the Dutch Reformed in Kabulonga), went shopping for some "luxury" items: four jars of chili pickle, two liters of light soy sauce, and 250g of Kasama coffee. Not to hard to spin my record when it comes to food, as long as there's enough. Came back, did a weightless workout, read the Sunday Post, the Bulletin & Record magazine, light lunch, and some online reading for tomorrow's meeting in Johannesburg.

HIV/AIDS does after awhile become part of the assumed landscape; like all things, the biggest curse the efforts facing the disease have is familiarity. New infections are supposedly at an ebb tide, the number infected (as a percentage) is falling, male circumcision is increasing, condom availability has gone up and ART is widely available. Contrasted with 2004 when I first arrived, and the change is startling; people are now more willing to admit been HIV+ (testing positive) for the disease, messages regarding prevention are a part (however small) of the social discourse, etc. All this good news causes people to relax somewhat; that's partly why we did a rural awareness campaign for the past week and a half leading up to WAD. We're integrating the message into our Conservation Agriculture project as well; however, it's less activism than design, making sure that their are methods that are HIV+ persons-friendly, i.e. low labor and big return.

On the farming front, the Post reported the current agriculture (Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, or MAL) minister, Robert Sichinga, apologized to farmers for the late delivery of subsidized farming inputs [under the Fertilizer Input Support Program or FISP]. Not surprising ... they were late last year, the year before that, 2010, etc. FISP is one of the major hang-ups facing modern day Zambia's agriculture ... it would be one thing if the government said "You know what? We're not delivering inputs at all this year." Doubtless farmers would lose their minds, and the urban sector would go nuts (as subsidizing maize ends up being a subsidy for urban consumers), but at least farmers would know not to wait for a chance at the FISP teat for something that won't arrive anytime soon.

On the flip side, if the inputs came on time and were targeted correctly, FISP might make a long term difference in giving the poor a leg up. According to IAPRI, most of the inputs lands accrue in the hands of farmers who don't really need the inputs per se (i.e., they have the capacity to purchase inputs on their own). Rumor has it that most of these farmers receive multiple packs (despite regulations stating that individuals should receive one pack only) and sell these at quite a profit, esp. given the past subsidy amount (> 80%). This effectively kills our agro-dealer market outside of the line-of-rail where commercialized, mainly white farmers have requirements for inputs other than maize, D-compound (10-20-10, 6% sulfur) and urea (46-0-0), as people who have money to buy fertilizer or seed are getting much of theirs for nearly free from the government.

Instead, we have in-between. Poorly targeted and poorly implemented over successive years has left farmers in a quandary; no one wants to abandon the cheap inputs (because they're cheap and show that the government "cares for" the rural poor). Therefore, they wait while the rains start falling, their fields as yet unplanted. They plant with uniform fertilizers across the world's 27th largest country (slightly larger than Texas) despite a staggering variety of soil and rainfall regimes. Agro-dealers stay away from investing in the maize market due to the price disadvantage; most keep no inventory, as they cannot depend on custom from nearby farmers who are awaiting FISP packs. A lose, lose, lose, lose situation. 

Not surprising therefore that unless Hon. Sichinga makes hay on his promises to deliver the remaining inputs before the end of December, he may swap jobs with someone as was the case earlier this year due to the slow distribution of inputs in 2012/13. Hopefully Zambia can somehow break out of this cycle before the inevitable decline in the copper price strips the shoes of the rest of the economy. 

A day in the life ...

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.

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:

1. Not being broke. I was broke for a long time and it's hard.
2. 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.
3. Running water. Frequent bucket baths make functioning showers the greatest thing in the world. 
4. Health. 
5. Fresh food nearby.
6. 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.
7. The guards. They do a lot of stuff without too much instruction.
8. 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. 
9. Old Crow Medicine Show. Chug along.

Happy Thanksgiving.