Well, last week we had our mid-term conference. The first two days were a permaculture workshop that was surprisingly useful. I’m now a double digging convert and have found a purpose for 2L plastic bottles (water root drip irrigation). We also had our medical sessions and a few LIFE related workshops. Now, up until my family comes I am working on getting a recumbent trike that works. Then, in almost exactly a week MY FAMILY FROM THE STATES ARE COMING! I’m excited and egger to show them around.
I think one thing I will spend my time here doing is write simple, clear guides on to how to make soap and maybe goat milking. Then I will try to get the language instructor or someone else who knows good chichewa and English to translate the steps into the local language. That way when I finally get back to site I can set up workshops on those subjects and give the steps as handouts.
Category: (c)2009 Aaron E-J
The Weekly Whirlwind
The last two weeks or so have been a whirlwind. This time a week ago I was in Lusaka although it seems like a month ago. I got some x-rays of my neck because that was where the discomfort had been and there was nothing out of order. However I stayed in Lusaka until Thursday because PC was finally going to work on my cycle to make one which was ridable. Last Friday I went back to site for the weekend and set up a jury rigged “irrigation” system that basically consisted of 25′ of hose connected to the 200L barrel I bought a while back. The kids were eager to help and filled up the tank several times and watered what was in the range of the hose.
On Monday I went back to Chipata to investigate possible bicycle engineers in the area to work with on the creation of a ridable cycle, however this was in vain. Although there is probably the biggest bicycle plant in Zambia here, they didn’t want to deviate from the standard cycle ridden by practically every Zambian. Another engineer was more interested, however he didn’t really have the resources to work on the complexities of designing a three-wheeled cycle using local materials. All this means that it is back to the same designers in Lusaka in May. Monday afternoon I went to the Msekera Conservation Farming Center because I found out that they have low cost irrigation systems for farmers in the area as well as training in their use. They were going to come to my site on Friday the 24th, however since then they have said that their schedule is too tight and it will have to be sometime in May. The one thing I was able to get is a rhizome of bamboo to plant in my Village as the closest place to find bamboo in Chadiza that I or my villagers know of is in Mozambique.
I tried to go back to site Wednesday the 22nd but the taxi didn’t come until after 1700 and I didn’t really want to get to bed at 2300 hours so I didn’t take it and will go today hopefully around noon.
Although I would have liked to set up an irrigation system this week (next 7 days), I’ve set one of my goals for before I go to Lusaka for the midterm conference is to get a working brick oven. I made one a while back but I have yet to try it out. I also got an innovative way of making a solar oven that uses an umbrella turned upside down. I also plan on making that in the next week. All for now.
This week, this horrible week
Had a rather scary bike accident Monday where I blanked out briefly. I first couldn’t remember what I had been doing that day, and had gaps in my memory in other times. That had mostly gone away that night and was completely gone the next day. My neck hurt though and I just felt kind of off that next day. I got a ride with the Eastern Province General Service Officer and spend the night in Chipata, then headed to Lusaka the next day. To make this week even more horrible, my wallet with all my bank card, my ID cards and a million kwacha (just about a months pay) in it. PC reimbursed me for the money but it was the irreplaceable things like my college id and such really sucks to loose. Hopefully someone will find it.
THE CHISWE’s INVADE!
2009-03-23~2009-04-06
Well, one of the reasons I haven’t posted so far is because the charger for my laptop, along with a bunch of other electronics was left in the taxi I took back to my site. Supposedly it got dropped off at the provincial house; however I haven’t been able to get to Chipata since then. Hopefully I will be able to go sometime this week. Another reason I need to head there is because I am trying to build an irrigation system for my demo plot before the dry season starts in earnest. I got a 200L barrel and about 16-17m of house however I still need to either get a lot more hose and try to design a pump, or get about 300m of strong rope and a bunch of pails. If I had more time, I would try to apply for a PC grant; however by the time one would be approved, my vegetables would have dried up and blown away.
Yesterday… THE CHISWE’s INVADED! I was walking behind my hut when I saw, as I have seen several times before, a line of ants moving in a narrow steam. In passing I hoped that they didn’t come into my hut but it wasn’t until I was surrounded by them that I realized that there hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of them. And that they were red ants. And that they were angry. I quickly made my escape, but not before they had begun occupying my entire body. After having taken off my cloths, picked the little buggers off me, and given my cloths a hardy shaking, I headed back out to face my foes. In the short time I had been in my hut they had almost entirely encircled the house and were demolishing virtually everything living. A villager had some meali-meal she was spreading out in a line to try to prevent their advancement but I realized more drastic measures were required so I was glad I had bought some ant spray, at the time to try to prevent termites (to little success). This eventually did the trick. Realizing that they were facing a mighty adversary, they eventually retreated. Just as fast as the countless tiny fiends had come, so they vanished, leaving not a living one in site. I wish I had a picture of the reddish black ground to show of the hero pyrethrum isotopes really are.
This last week I have been in Chipata in a HIV/AIDS training session
This last week I have been in Chipata in a HIV/AIDS training session with local counterparts. It is interesting to here the Zambians speak openly about sex and the differences between men’s and women’s sexual relationships and their perceptions. The training ended on Thursday and I have been busy trying to install a Linux build on some flash drives which I finally achieved but now the problem is that I still can’t access the internet on my cell phone because it requires an .exe (windows) program so I have been trying to find a windows emulator, so far unsuccessfully. Short one I know.
Ah, Zambia has an electrically repulsive field about it… that makes everything crash
2009-02-21~2009-03-08
The weekend in which the days of February 2009 21st & 22nd was included I found a internet place that, although it was fairly expensive because you paid by the hour, it was the cheapest if you needed to download things, which I did because they didn’t have a bandwidth limit. Also, if the last sentence, to the reader, does not seem extremely convoluted, you have laxer reading standards then I. I got most of what I really needed to do, done save for working on the quarterly reports and researching whether it is possible/feasible to by a stepper motor/generator from a treadmill from the states and have it shipped here. I got a few things from the down shops but didn’t get much done during this visit because there was no power until my taxi came on Monday when, as we were moving my luggage to the car someone was turning on the power. The last week of February I didn’t do that much, just did some weeding and planting. There was supposed to be a meeting the day after I got back of the Chadiza Entrepreneurs Associationo at 900 hours, and my bike was still in the boma because I didn’t pick it up the night before when I was headed back Ku Dovu. Therefore I got up at 400 and walked the 10 km. However first the meeting was moved from 900 to 1400, then just before I was headed there, I got a text saying that the meeting had been canceled.
The eventful catastrophic however, was that I had left my laptop transferring files from my external hard drive to my mp3 player while I went to get some things from the market. When I got back, my computer had one of those blue screens that means fatal error. When I tried to restart windows, part way into the boot up I got, and kept getting, the same “unmountable_boot_volume” message every time I restarted windows. I can still “use” my computer by booting from the Linux OS I downloaded the last time I was in Lusaka. However the build I chose was a bad choice because it doesn’t come with useful programs, tends to crash and can’t play mp3 files, therefore I can’t even ad things to my mp3 players. Oh, and what’s even worse is that my mp3 player has crashed or at lease needs a re-installation which I can’t do because windows doesn’t work on my laptop. What’s more I can’t put things on my ipod because my Linux build won’t run my external hard drive and can’t play mp3 files anyway so I’m down to searching shortwave for channels that come in. (So far I’ve listened to BBC, VOA, Radio Canada, Radio Netherlands, Deutsche Welle Radio, Radio France, Radio India, China Radio, Radio South Africa, Voice of Russia and some other stations I can’t remember). The only problem is that most of them only come in for a couple of hours and even then not that well and that my radio player is not really portable in the sense that you can listen to it while moving from place to place. I finally was able to put some podcasts on my new phone, however the battery life on it is not as good as my devices for the sole purpose of playing music.
The first Monday of March, I happened to meet with the person from ALLINET I had worked with off and on in the past. We got to talking and we decided to start documenting the history of Chadiza by doing interviews with people who had lived in the area for a long time. On Tuesday we started looking for people to interview, however it started raining and we didn’t interview anyone that day. On Friday, the Chadizain who was working on the project with me had found some people who knew quite a bit about the district and we began filming. However the tape soon ran out of film which means that we could only get one interview in in its entirety. Oh, one other thing I have been working on is building a table using some wood I bought in Chipata a while back and finally had delivered when a PC vehicle picked up some volunteers in training who were doing their first site visit… yeah, probably first site visit was one of the best weeks of training. Anyway, I got the top of the table made and have started getting the legs of the table from local tries. However the tree I chose was a real workout to cut down and the problem I now have is that it didn’t really fall but just slid of the stump but is still vertical. My arm muscles are definitely not used to the rather awkward angle I needed to do the sawing, but the wood seems pretty good quality hardwood. I actually felt kind of bad about cutting down the tree because it had probably been there for 75 years. Hopefully I can rig up some means of horizontalizing the tree for easier cutting.
On Sunday, after having exhausted my arm strength for the day, I ate some beans I had cooked the day before and typed part of this journal entry while the rain came probably the hardest it has all year. When the rain finally let up, I checked a cup that had been sitting out in the rain and it was almost full, probably 5-7cm (4-5 inches). I went down to the closest stream and began to take pictures however a drunk man started insistently asking me to take his pictures so I began walking down the gushing river. I was about to go back and start preparing supper when the head woman and later an entourage of teenage villagers told me to follow them. They brought me to a rocky area that reminded me of Devils Falls back in New Hartford, CT or the tidal rapids in Blue Hill, ME. There were many pictures taken of various people in various poses from various angles and then I was told I would have supper with the son of one of the farmers.
Oh, and hopefully I will have time next week to post some blogs about what people do and what people like to do next week because I know that a lot of people have wanted to learn more about what Zambian culture is like.
This week I have been working mu ndi and submitting, for the umpteenth time, a version of my internet proposal
2009-02-12~2009-02-18
This week I have been working mu ndi dimba (in the garden) and doing some other things including submitting, for the umpteenth time, a version of my internet proposal. This time it went to the Chadiza Business Association and this is probably my most promising avenue through which I have gone yet, probably because they reinitiated the contact where as all the previous organizations have not followed through. There is a meeting scheduled for next Tuesday. Yesterday, (Tuesday the 17th) I got another bed. The one I had my mattress on before was actually someone’s grandmothers and I’m sure she was glad to get it back. I had paid the wood for a local carpenter to make one back last November, however apparently the person he in turn paid for lumber to, never gave him any. That is why my bed is a double bed for a single mattress because I guess he had made a double bed earlier. Anyway, now my house is a little more crowded. I need to get varnish in Chipata to make sure it doesn’t get eaten by termites. Incidentally, I am going to Chipata tomorrow (Thursday) and will stay there until next Monday, getting some things and meeting with some of the incoming LIFE/RED PSTV’s who are going on first site visit. It’s kind of surprising (and at the same time not at all surprising) that I will have been in Zambia for a year.
Working in my garden and creating a “fuel efficient” oven plus the internet-in-Chadiza saga
2009-02-07~2009-02-11
The past couple of days I have been working in my garden and creating a “fuel efficient” oven which is going to take forever for the clay to dry in this wet weather. The latest turn on the internet-in-Chadiza saga is that I have been approved by the Chadiza business association about getting internet. I made a bit of modification to an earlier proposal I had written for schools and am just looking for a printer to print it out and give to the chair of the organization.
Wednesday I began making a “fuel efficient” oven
2009-02-04
Wednesday I began making a “fuel efficient” oven (hopefully uses a small amount of fuel but still burns… the small amount is likely to be achieved but the “still burns” part maybe not), however I ran out of clay so I will finish it this weekend. At ≈1630-1700 I walked to a small market across from Zingalume basic school in search of mangoes. The market is usually mostly closed but today everything was bustling. I guess it was because it was Wednesday when government employees (teachers) get paid and therefore that is when all the shops are open because everyone has money. I wonder if doing some training on fiscal frugality would be of use.
2009-02-05
Went to the BOMA in my search for an alternator, preferably a K1 model that is found in things like Ford Fiestas and Escorts. There is one store in Chadiza that is where everyone brings there maize and other goods to be sent away and therefore probably has 6-7 18+/-wheelers of varying levels of assembly, however they didn’t have anything. The store owner however said that someone who has a house next to where my closest volunteers live has a bunch of car parts lying around so I will check there.
Back in the Village
2008-02-01 – Sunday
-spent the morning packing up and then online, although the power went out so I only had two hours of battery time
-called a taxi and after having gone to the market, left for a 3 hour ride the ≈90km (50 miles) back
2008-02-02
-planted some more watermelon, plum tomatoes, and “winter” squash
2008-02-03
-went to the BOMA and charged my various devices. The smaller connection of my USB wire that I used to connect my (non-ipod) mp3 player to my laptop got crushed so that it won’t fit in the slot. Fortunately the wire that for the new phone that I got is the same size.