Hello Everyone!

First off I want to say thank you to all of my family and friends who have sent me mail here in Zambia! I have recieved your cards and letters. Almost everytime I have come to the PC House I have had a card from somebody and it really is a great feeling getting to hear you've been doing. All of your Thanksgiving cards have made it just in time for the holiday. We celebrated yesterday and had a wonderful meal. We were even able to track down a Turkey! Plus our PC Volunteer Leader brought back pumpkin pie mix and cranberry sauce!

I will be visiting Kundalila Falls tomorrow! So my site has been great and the people here are wonderful. I wish I could send pictures, but its not feasible over this connection via cell phone. I am sending a CD home to my parents for those of you who live near enough to drop in and see them.

I am posting what I have written Jim (my adviser for the Master's International Program) for my quaterly report.

I miss and love you all! Thanks again for your thoughts and well wishes and especially the mail!

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Joshua Girard
Kanona, Zambia
Quarterly Report 1/2: July – November 2008

Since this is the first report, I will discuss training and my first months at site. I will cover the Provincial Meetings and December in my next report.

Sitting down at a computer for the first time in months and trying to reflect on and recount the entirety of this experience so far is extremely challenging. I don’t even know where to start. Every day my mind is filled with a million different thoughts. I guess I will try to just start from the beginning and continue chronologically.

So staging was pretty much uneventful bureaucracy. However, first impressions were made. I will admit that I was a bit concerned with how I was getting along with everyone. Our intake was mostly young fresh out of college. One man had been in PC Zambia and then ETed and was returning in our intake as a RAPer (Rural Aquaculture Promotion). I offered to be one of the four people organizing our trip to the airport in D.C. and then on through Lusaka. He told me that all of these people ETed from his previous intake because once they got to site they couldn’t handle not being in control or getting things accomplished in the manner they wanted. So I was then completely self aware about whether I was over thinking things. It’s good to be motivated to take charge but you also need to realize the limitations of things you wouldn’t normally find as limitation in America. It was a good lesson to get me through training and posting: relax, don’t have expectations.

The first major event in country was First Site Visit. Basically we are crammed in the back of a land cruiser and hauled out of Lusaka to the bush. (I never thought you could fit 16 people into a land cruiser.) Basically they want to give us a taste of rural Zambia before they brought us back to the comforts of occasionally running water, light bulbs, seats more than 6 inches from the ground, and Zam-erican food. My site visit group was 5 guys going to visit a RAP volunteer (Pat) in Central Province. We saw some snakes, met some of his farmers and saw their ponds, conquered the pit latrine, cooked on the fire, met the family he lives near. It was the middle of the dry season and I went days without seeing clouds and although you could tell many plants were shriveled and waiting to burst into life, the landscape was still beautiful. Except when the Zambians had set it on fire. It is common practice in the dry season to randomly light fires and let them burn hectares of land so that grasses will shoot green sprouts for animal grazing. The smell of burning country side and the thought of driving past an inferno with the heat blasting through the windows of the cruiser definitely brings me back to the first weeks.

Figure 1 – My House in Chongwe with grass bathing shelter to right and cassava tree in foregroundUpon returning we were placed with host families in the “village” so that we could learn about culture, practice language, and learn the do’s-and-don’ts of village life. Really we were in Chongwe which is a rather large town in Zam-terms about 45 minutes outside of Lusaka. The two programs in our intake RAP and HAP (HIV/AIDS Project) had separate language and tech trainings, but we met every Thursday for cultural and PC development sessions. I enjoyed training. I thought it was well run and had a good pace. My family had hosted three volunteers for 9 week trainings. I was probably the best fed in the whole group and had a pit latrine with a raised seat! But since my dad spoke English well and the kids and mom barely spoke Bemba (the language I’m learning) I didn’t learn as much as I could have. The family also didn’t have the same excitement about hosting me as the first time hosts. But for training the drawbacks were minor and the I never got sick so the experience was wonderful overall.

Figure 2 - My insaka and my bathing shelterSo during training we learned about our site placements and visited them for a little while during second site visit. I was very impressed with my site: Kanona, Serenje District, Central Province. The housing committee built a wonderful house with well hinged wooden shutters and decorated exterior. The insaka, which will serve as my office and kitchen was large and rectangular instead of round. My bathing shelter was made of bricks instead of grass and had a roof, which will make bathing much nicer during the rainy season. The landscape is gorgeous. Many small mountains (Mont Ripley-ish) and small trees cover the area. The area is more rural than in many of the other places I’ve been, which means that there is a large distance between family compounds. My family, the Kulula’s live, on 20 hectares. The farm is about 2 km from the paved Great North Road and 4 km from Kanona town. The town has a lively Sunday market, basic school, and some shops. It has been described less favorably by others. But I am very happy with it. I can get basics there (even bread, talk time for my cell phone, and potatoes). Although last week none of the shops had Clorin for water treatment. They have built a new cell phone tower on the mountain in town so I have full cell service and have been able to talk each weekend with my parents via Sykpe.

After the completion of training I was ready to get out into the bush to start experiencing the independence and reality of what I would be living and working in. The adjustment was really good and I think I have established my routines and learned about those of the family. Every morning I wake up around 5:30 as the sun is rising. I greet the family and then do my dishes from the night before. I then usually go to get water, do laundry, or go to the garden. The first week in site Mr. Mulenga helped me plant some cucumbers, peppers, carrots, and tomatoes. The garden is looking excellent now and I look forward to beginning to pick things when I return after this week. I have also received some herb, squash, tomato, and other seeds from home. Weeding in the garden is definitely my time to unwind and get some time away from the children, who for the most part are amazing, but sometimes quiet is nice.

There are three families on the compound all daughters of the matriarch Edinah Kulula. She is a widow of a man who had been very successful businessman. He was able to run a farm in which he hired help and was more than just subsistence (so semi-commercial). Mainly his wealth came from poaching elephants for ivory. Since his death the family has been “witched” by the former workers of the farm and the family has reverted to subsistence farming.

Evelyn is a widow and has four children living with her. One who gets into a lot of trouble and definitely befriended me in the beginning in the hopes of getting what he could out of me. He never helps in the fields, comes home late after drinking, and got kicked out of school so last week he received a pretty good beating as punishment (since his mom can’t take away a car, TV, or Playstation from him).

Rhoda and Joseph’s house is about 25 yards from mine and they have eight children. Sometimes it gets a bit noisy, but they are so kind. Everyday they prepare my bathwater and bring me coals for the stove. And the children’s endless fascination with things like spices, potato peelers, knives (different then the dull village knives), soaps, etc. continues to amaze me. Although, when I visit somebody’s house and see that they have a special chair, moped, flashlight, or shoes, I can’t help but think how bwana they are. Bwana being a person of great respect/wealth.

The last family is of Nellie and David who have two daughters and an older girl who is their dependent. Orphans in the village are generally well cared for considering what you might expect. The concept of family is very different here. The is no “extended family,” they are just family. So most are taken in by family members. Those in the cities I think have a different fate and many NGO’s and missionaries have set up orphanages for those street children. So David is the most excited about fish farming on the compound and we have measured a pond, but progress has been slow. And I am unsure whether there will be issues with alcohol. Drinking in villages is often an issue and sometimes the only way women find to make money for their families is by brewing village beer.

So the community has been wonderful! They are taking very good care of me. I also expect that fish farming work will escalate in the coming months. So far I have been working with David and Mr. Simpamba. Both are currently constructing ponds. I have plans to start working with Mr. Chita (chairman of my housing committee) when I return to site. I have had one community meeting to do introductory things, but I am thinking of maybe asking the school to host a fish farming meeting soon. I want to get those interested in starting farming fish motivated, make meetings with them, and explain the benefits of starting to integrate ponds into there current farming.
Figure 3 – Finished stove with only one pot in place
Joseph and David have helped me to build a wood burning stove. I was using a charcoal brazier but I wanted to try using a stove myself in case I decided to focus on them in the future. It works well, almost better than I expected. And having two “burners” makes cooking much faster. I also use smaller wood which can be clooected from the ground where the termites would eat it otherwise. The women usual cook on open fires with 10 inch diameter logs. Sometimes they don’t even use stones just a metal rack, which lets even more heat escape.

The country is extremely dichotomous. The urban wealthy (relative terms here) are like a little slice of the west plopped down in Africa: tight jeans, capitalism, strip malls, satellite TV, processed food, CARS. The rural areas: wrap skirts, subsistence, concrete tin roofed market stall, Bibles, food fought from the soil, bikes. This makes it difficult to get education and health care to rural areas because often teachers and civil servants must be coerced to live in rural areas. Or even worse, the underperforming ones are sent there “as punishment.” Also civil servants aren’t fired in Zambia they are just transferred because of contract stipulations, cost, and lack of replacements. The ideas of wealth and “development” to many people are having things that many of us would rather do without in the US: TV, cars, an outlet to plug useless things into. The children especially are fascinated with motokas. They build them out of clay, stop what they are doing to watch them, see objects on the ground to play with and start making engine noises and driving it around the ground. People in the city who can afford to buy their food purchase bleached and finely-ground breakfast meal instead of regular mealie meal for cooking nshima which has less nutrition. And people prefer the jam without real fruit, the artificially colored and overly sugary kind. The idea that further from “natural” is better is opposite to many cultural trends in America: organic foods and the “green” movement.

I’ve met the headmaster at Kanona Basic School and invited him to send two girls and one teacher to this year’s Central Province Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World). Gender equality and women in development are definitely topics stressed by PC and many development organizations. Gender roles help to define culture, so it is definitely a gray area in terms of ethnocentricity and one’s beliefs. I support the camp because it teaches women how to protect themselves from HIV/AIDS, which they are more likely to contract, goal setting, and gives them an opportunity to extend their world and meet other young women from other areas. While I expected women to carry many of the burdens of their families, it is much different being here than the pictures painted before I came. Based on my personal beliefs there are some things that I think women should work to change, but the issue is definitely a lot more complex than just “empowering women” in our American sense of the phrase.

Figure 4 – My house and pit latrine in backgroundSome things that I read about in Blair’s class are implemented here in Zambia. For example motorized hammer mills for grinding grain and saving women time, or multiple boreholes in residential areas. So while some things are a nice surprise there is still plenty to be done. I have been thinking about projects I could focus on other than the fish pond stuff. I just met a government health worker for the district of Serenje and plan on finding the health worker for Kanona. He told me that they were doing some work with boreholes, surveying their locations or something. I expected water to be a bigger issue coming here. Maybe I have become desensitized, but it isn’t as bleak as I expected. Everyone I have met has a perennial source of water near their homes (stream, furrow, shallow well). While some situations of cleanliness have been worse, most of the water was not very turbid. People in my family do not use chlorine because it is “too expensive.” It is kw 2,500. For me I would chlorinate my drinking water rather than buy that extra bit of cooking oil or beer. A day of physical labor is about kw 10,000. People also don’t boil water, which would be easily integrated to their daily activities (fire is kept burning all day). I would like to read some things about risk perception in developing countries. I don’t think it’s just ignorance either, I saw one of the girl’s notebooks with notes from health class, explaining to boil or chlorinate water for drinking. The man I talked to knew that water can make you sick, and admitted that people get sick from water.
There are a couple issues here though. He might of thought that I was asking these questions with the intention of giving them chlorine. He said that people would treat there water and that they didn’t mind the taste, just that if it were kw 1,500 they would pay, but not kw 2,500. I suppose our relative wealth and American culture are inseparable concepts, but I do not think that most Americans would risk their health (especially that of their children for kw 1,000 even if they had as little money as these people). At home water treatment is definitely the way to go in rural Zambia, the communities are simply not set up in a way that would make some of the systems we heard about in DR and Panama feasible. Most people use good water containers, screw top jerry cans and sometimes buckets with or with out lids. Another issue which has broader impacts than just in water/health is that all classes after the first couple grades are taught in English. There is now way that these kids understand health issues, science, math, history etc. in a English if they can’t hold even a simple conversation with me. They are just forced to copy the words from the board and then to memorize them for examines. This to me is one of the most awful things to see for somebody who values knowledge and education so much.

It is also no wonder why Zambia is a self-proclaimed Christian nation. Missionaries have worked harder than most NGO’s in pushing there ideas on these people. Most reading All reading materials I have seen in the village are pamphlets and Bibles painstakingly translated into Bemba by the Watchtower of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Its funny in a sad kind of way to get (what account for probably like 95% of Bemba printings) the Watchtower pamphlet AWAKE! with the headline “Your Child and the Internet! – What are they really doing online?” in a place where most people have not seen a computer and don’t have electricity.

Approximately 50% of Zambians are under the age 16 and the child mortality rate has been recently announced by the WHO to be preventing Zambia from meeting its 2015 MGD’s in health. I want to learn more about water born parasites and what percentage of deaths under five are related to those infections. I have heard that its is a lot.

Figure 5 – My garden! Cucmbers and carrots front, tomatoes and peppers in backAnother big issue in Zambia is rapid deforestation due to chitimene or slash-and-burn agriculture which is practiced in my area. With the growing population, less and less land is available each year to clear cut and burn the trees for fields. Therefore, the government has a conservation farming program which promotes limited use of fertilizers and more sustainable farming practices. Farmers here believe that they need fertilizers to make their fields grow. The fertilizer is heavily subsidized; I think up to 75% of the cost is covered by the government. People organize into “co-ops” to be able to take advantage of the subsidy, but don’t actually work together. A new government could never be elected without promising the subsidies. Chitimene is the most detrimental to the forest, and the fire wood they do collect usually comes from these slashed areas. But maybe by promoting fuel efficient cook stoves, attention could be drawn to the issues of deforestation in Zambia and the health risks associated with daily smoke inhalation (to which “we are used”). I imagine that this smoke has worse effects on their health than the birth control pills which rural doctors tell the women will make them sterile or give them cancer. I had an interesting conversation with the women about how women in America don’t have 8-14 children. I really believe that women here don’t want to have as many children as they do, but some people and organizations definitely have different ideas when it comes to birth control. The difficult thing is that (even though I’m not saying giving away things is right in all situations) they have access to free condoms and even birth control. But I have met people who have been told that condoms have HIV in them.

We learned some of the good and bad things about NGOs in Blair’s class; however, I underestimated the effect of these aid organizations on the psyche of the people here. It is truly a development crisis. People have been taught under colonialism that they are inferior to the white man and when Britain left there was such a void created. Africans weren’t allowed to go to university or have any government positions. Therefore the British left Zambia with a system of rule which was very different from the traditional system and which there was nobody to run. The judges still wear those funny looking white wigs. Now, after only 50 years of self rule, the country is flooded by outsiders offering a helping hand. Most of the vehicles on the road are petroleum tankers or import goods from Tanzania headed for Lusaka. Second most common are NGO vehicles, which are ridiculously nice compared to any private Zambian vehicle, taxi or minibus, and traveling at 130 kph. So people here are very nice and respectful, since that is the nature of this atypically peaceful African country. But it is hard trying to know if they just want to get something out of you. They have become used to feeling like development means getting things from the outside. Many (even government people) have come to believe that they can’t do things on their own.
Figure 6 – Mariam, Jackson, Mafito, Mwansa, Pepika, Mwape (Clockwise from far left)I have an internet capable phone, but the network settings required must be set up manually at an MTN store. This means the next time I go to Lusaka since there are maybe three of those stores in the entire country. However, the situation with communication has been better than I expected. Mail hasn’t taken too long (or I got the two packages sent from home) and some letters and cards from family and friends. I get these at the PC house in Serenje which is 56 km away. I have to walk from my house, 30 minutes, and then wait for an unknown length of time until somebody stops to pick me up. Hitchhiking is the best mode of transport since the minibuses here are just downright dangerous. So its best to try to get a ride in a private vehicle, but even that is questionable (just this last ride I got they had beers in the cup holders). The house has internet but it is via a cell phone SIM card. However, once I get my cell phone internet working I will be able to at least make short responses to e-mail from my site.

Figure 7 – The pond I measured with Mr. Simpamba. He has had the inner box dug and is starting on the interior slopesThe rains have started and the landscape is transforming. Africa is incredibly beautiful. Everyday I see an amazing bug, or the clouds building in the blue sky into an intense thunderstorms. The people will give you the very best of what they have and leave themselves with nothing if you let them. The plants and wildflowers provide a new sight more beautiful than most commercially grown flowers with every new week. And while its easy to cite the pit latrine, lack of running water, electricity, buckets showers, and cooking over fires as unimaginable to adjust to, but really those are the simplest to get used to. There are so many things. Just last week I saw a beautiful parrot crossing a stick bridge in the middle of the African bush with the sounds of vervet monkeys calling in the distance.

Address:
Joshua Girard
U.S. Peace Corps
P.O. Box 850010
Serenje, Central ProvinceZAMBIA