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 ...

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 ...