Category: Journal

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

2008-01-03~2008-01-21
Spent Saturday trying to download Fedora Live (a popular Linux build) and podcasts but while the network at the deputy US ambassadors house had been fairly fast during the week, this weekend the connection was close to nothing so on Sunday I took my laptop to the PCZ HQ, where the Wi-Fi wasn’t much better but I started downloading the program on the PC computer using the separate LAN line connection where the speed was faster (although it still was going to take something like 6-8 hours for it to complete).
When Monday rolled around and I was supposed to leave, I took a taxi to the PCZ HQ and checked to make sure that the download had been completed. It hadn’t. Extremely annoyed because this had to be close to my 10th attempt at this, I began the download once again. After hemming and hawing a little bit I decided to spend one more day in Lusaka to make sure that the download got completed as this was a large reason I had gone down there in the first place.
On Tuesday, after a late night spend ensuring that the download would be complete, I got a complete, I got what I had intended to be a few hours sleep the I woke up and realized I had gotten quite a bit more then that because the alarm I had had not been set. I eventually took the mini bus to the Intercity Bus Terminal and made the mistake of following the over “helpful” assistance of terminal workers who, although they didn’t say it, worked for one company that cost 35,000k more then I could have gone down here for and waited 3, 4, or maybe 5 hours for the bus to be full, scratch that, very full. I didn’t get to Chipata until something like 2200 hours and was really annoyed and frustrated. I’m definitely hitching back from now on.
Wednesday I went to the down shops in search of electrical components for trying to build my pedal powered generator and after some asking around, (got sent to one place that didn’t have any electrical parts, got sent to another place that had thousands of components but the people working the shop weren’t knowledgeable enough to be able to help me without a part number so I got sent to a third tiny little store down a back road that had old TVs, computer and unidentifiable circuit boards piled to the ceiling) success!. After some searching around, the store owner who was probably the most electrically savvy person I’ve met in Zambia came up with three of the .47Ω resistors to detune the alternator so that it will be still pedalable when the battery is low and some 12v diodes to make it so that connecting the charger the wrong way around wont fry it. He then took me to still another store that had multi-meters and soldering irons which I didn’t get because I wasn’t sure whether I would be using the tools someone in the Chadiza BOMA has or not. I think I will get them next time I go.
I decided to take an extra day at the provincial house so on Thursday went to the down shops again I think to try to find a stainless steel pot to try to do some canning from. I was outside of one of the shops trying to enter some more talk time into my phone when I someone said something to me and I looked up. The next thing I knew my wallet was gone (it had over a million kwacha in it as I had just gone to the bank to get cash for my coming time in the village where there is no ATM). I gave chase but I hadn’t gotten a good look at the guy who had taken it. Fortunately other people saw that I had gotten something stolen and they also gave chase. Before long I got lucky because they had got him and after a little bit of a tug of war, I had gotten my wallet back. By this point there were probably fifty to a hundred people on the seen causing quite a ruckus so I decided to end my search. I went and gathered my things and started off but before I had gotten far some law enforcement officials showed up in a SUV and gave me a ride back which was nice. My taxi that I had called never showed up and I almost thought I would have to spend another day in Chipata but fortunately when I called my forestry counterpart he said that the Chadiza police man, apparently a close friend of his, would be going back today and after some calls and finally a walk to the station, I found him and got free ~2 hour ride back.
I was somewhat discouraged the next day because I had been counting on the new dimba (garden) I had paid someone to be build had not been completed but my expanded fence which I had put udzu (grass) around had been re-grassed. I would have been glad that they had done it as it would last a lot longer, however I had planted quite a few vegetables which I was really looking forward to their being up but which the majority of them had either been trammeled or had just not grown.
My fence didn’t get done until late Sunday or Monday January 18th or 19th although I planted three or four rows of maze on Saturday and I’m worried the rain will stop before its ready. I started planting the rest of the maze on Tuesday January 20th and was expecting this to take several long days in the field to complete. It wasn’t that long, however, before someone who I realized was the guy who had been building my fence, started helping. Before long he had take over the planting and had the entire field done in about an hour. I guess if you’ve been doing it since you could barely walk, you can do it slightly better then a muzgu.
While I was waiting for my dimba to be ready to dimbanize I have been still trying to work on the internet proposal and try to see if anyone wants to make a short movie for a competition being put on by the US embassy on what “democracy means to you”. So far these two projects have not really gotten anywhere. I have also have been trying to learn more about VOIP and java ME programming for cell phones although there is a mountain of things to learn if I think I want to pursue this project.

2008-12-11~2008-12-26

The last two weeks I have basically been doing two things: working on my dimba (garden) and going to the BOMA. I said I would pay someone in my village k100,000 to plow and build a fence around a new space close to my nymba (house), however when I left to go to Chipata for Christmas, they hadn’t really started, a week and a half after I left. I did plant a bunch of things inside my expanded fence that I put udzu (grass, not plural for the lethal weapon) along. The only problem is the water doesn’t drain well so I get water in the holes I put my seeds in. I should have made mounds not holes, but oh well, hopefully they will still grow.

In talking to someone in the BOMA who works with the organization ALINET we had the idea of creating a Chadiza TV show. I think this would be great if we can actually see it through. I talked today, (Friday the 26^th) with someone at ZNBC, the national broadcasting body run by the Zambian government, about how hard would be to submit the show, and he said it would be very easy.

On Monday I got up at 3:15AM and biked to the BOMA with someone from the village who was going to get his maze milled carrying the axel to my cargo trike I was going to have ground down and threaded so I can make each wheel able to turn independently. Well I tried to find a government vehicle going to Chipata but it seemed that none were. After hemming and hawing over whether to leave my stuff in the BOMA and try again tomorrow or take a taxi, when someone kind of acting as a taxi showed up, I decided to pay the 40 pin and go. We went a different root then we usually go so that part of the way could be on tarmac, however that meant it took longer, the time compounded by the fact that when we had too many people in the vehicle so just before we reached a check point where we would have been stopped, we dropped someone off. Then after the vehicle had been checked by a police man, we drove a little farther and waited for the other guy, who had gotten a bike taxi to take him to where we were. When A little while after I got to the provincial house, I realized I had not gotten the axel from the taxi driver and had no way to contact him. He never showed up so I’m kind of stuck. I guess I will have to look for a long 9mm piece of threaded rod. I was really tiered from getting up pa 315, so I didn’t do much the rest of the day

Tuesday I went to the market and Shopright, then went to ProNet for a while. Coming back, I worked on typing in the words in Chichewa and English that I had recorded audio versions of and also had dinner that some people had cooked with everyone.

Wednesday I spent a while recording audio which is slow going because the flash cards that have the spelling of the Chichewa were not really in the order I had recorded them. Fortunately Chichewa is written almost 100% phonetically so it’s not that hard to get the spelling correct. In the evincing we had a many course dinner that a volunteer had cooked and had chocolate fondue and apple crisp for desert.

Thursday I spent a while typing in more Chichewa, then someone came and said that it was time to open presents, which I was not expecting. We had a good time opening presents and I wished I had brought the stockings my family ku America had given me so I could also put something in them and give them to people. I got a goody bag, some pottery that had been mate locally and some rechargeable AA batteries which was a large gift it seemed. We then had a Mexican meal for our Christmas dinner which was really good. After washing some dishes, another volunteer and I watched the movie Fight Club – not at all what I was expecting – although I didn’t see all of it because my family called. It was nice to talk to them and hopefully we can have a video VOIP call when I go to Lusaka next week.

Friday went to the market and got some more black plastic, this time they had some heavy stuff that was good, and a bicycle spoke truing fork for hopefully putting the wheels back on my new bike. While at the market I brought my video camera and filed some footage of the market and downtown Chipata. Around 1200 or 1230 I went to the internet place for a while. Then at a little after 1600, I headed to the office of ZNBC because someone had said they had electrical parts I could use to make the pedal powered generator I would like to build. The guy there wasn’t sure why someone had said they have electrical parts, but we talked about internet and putting the Chadiza TV show on their station. I then spent a while chopping up vegetables for some stew, but it wasn’t ready by the time I wanted to eat, so I just had peppers, mangoes, frozen bananas & broiled zucchini. After dinner, the acting PCVL, one of my nearest PC neighbors, had a writing workshop where we all wrote for 10 minutes about a word that had been chosen at random from a magazine, then read them out load. The quality of the writing was impressive given that it was just free flow, never leave your pen from the paper/fingers from the keyboard. The ones I wrote are down below:

The police…

They showed up at ten. The sky was over cast and the wind blew like a dieing fan, sputtering. You see, the police came because there had been another incident, and this time it was worse. This time there were many small fragments coming together and they were beginning to make sense.

It all started some time ago, the first incident that is. Then, there were only a few involved and the whole thing seemed innocuous enough. I wouldn’t have noticed it if it weren’t for the fact that I had seen the two together before, always speaking in hushed tones and glancing side to side like they were being followed. When they caused it to occur I had been watching them through the tinted glass of my beat up 1964 VW bug. They started getting things out of the pockets of there trench cotes – that was it! Their trench coats were the key. I saw it now but what if it was too late. And it was.

Gift Certificate

I got this gift certificate in the mail with no name, no return address, no way to tell who had sent it. It was to a store that had been around for some time, though I had never been there. Well, now I had a reason to go in. I think they sold clothes; there was probably something else that was there. But who had given it? Had they meant to put a name, or were they just trying to act as one of those anonymous philanthropists? I never understood why people didn’t want to get credit for what they did. Maybe they just figured that when they had given enough, it would slowly trickle into people’s consciousness who had been.

Then there was the obvious idea that it was a promotion, but it had been all hand written. Maybe I should go to the store and ask. Anyway, I didn’t have any need for more cloths, or anything else for that mater, except for some occasional trips to get food I couldn’t grow and a few other things.

6 months. A quarter. A half of a half. Six months in 18 to go. In one sense it’s an enormous amount of time, 18 moths before I graduated from college, I was still thinking I would make a movie for my final project, but it isn’t really enough time to get anything really substantial done. I wish I had known exactly what I would do when I got posed, but I’m still not sure I have any idea what I’m doing now. Well, I know what I would like to do, but the challenge always is making a dream a reality. Isn’t strange how true the ying and the yang are? every action has an equal and opposite reaction, even when it doesn’t seem action has an opposite like an apple, what’s the opposite of an apple?

In the corner,

We were sitting,

Sitting in our little room,

Writing things that made no sense,

Writing with no purpose, none,

Save to practice ancient skill,

Once known to just a few,

This ancient art can bring down foe,

Can be the meaning of a life,

However is it not so strange,

That words cannot be used,

For the purpose of an interface

Between another two,

Unless they have that shared knowledge,

Of a common idiom.

Problem. Mavuto. Mavuto Problem. You see that’s the problem, try as I might, ndi Chichewa is still pagono pagono. Isn’t it strange what words you pick up and what words, you read over and over and over again and still, a few minutes later, you can’t think of it if your life depended on it. I think it’s kind of true that if you actually set out to learn a specific word, it’s expediently more difficult to remember. And that’s the problem, you need to pretend that its not important, and you’ll remember it.

Problem, if there were none, there would be no solutions. It is just that one cannot always choose the problems one faces when they arise out of the occurrence of something not initiated by you.

Problem, what makes things interesting, challenging, but not always fun

2008-12-01&02

Spent most of the day at the ProNet internet place doing research on various ways to connect to the intent and some other things.

2008-12-03

After getting some stuff at the market I went to talk again to an electrician who I have inquired about making a pedal powered bike generator and who had suggested my looking into a “dynamo” type generator (I was a little unsure what it looked like but he had said that it was a generator used to electrify bicycles). I basically went to all the bicycle stores in Chipata in the last few days, and although the thing seemed familiar to some of them, no one had it. After doing some internet research, I found that dynamo generators also referred to DC generators old used in old vehicles like VW bugs. I got a circuit diagram for use in regulating voltage in this type of generator as well as a diagram which required far fewer parts for use in regulating voltage of a more modern AC car alternator with the built in circuitry to convert it to DC so that all you really needed was the proper resister and a few fuses. I got a recommendation of where to find an alternator for the later of the two designs and this store did have one although the price was fairly steep.

-went to the internet place briefly after calling a taxi because I didn’t really feel like trying to deal with the hassle of trying to hitch and I would almost certainly need to find a taxi to go the last 10km from the BOMA to Dovu village.

-at about 1430-1500 the taxi came and after waiting a while for another passenger at Shopright, finally left and we headed back

2008-12-04

-Spent the morning planting things and the afternoon reading

2008-12-05

-went to the BOMA and charged my devices and got some things

-came back and planted some more things

2008-12-06

-spent most of the day cleaning my hut and putting black plastic under my ceiling to prevent the sawdust from the termites and other burrowing insects that are slowly eating my rafters from falling down on everything. Also directed a villager in putting up another tarp and some black plastic.

2008-12-07

-planted more things then cooked some tomato sauce/salsa. Read some and went to bed early so I could get up early.

2008-12-08

-met with the DFO regarding signing a leave form for some days I plan on going to Lusaka at the end of December.

-went to the market and got some mangoes and other things, including a Zambian native squash type thing that my banja had given me earlier and tasted pretty good

-charged my devices and finished a memo I was working on to the Chadiza environmental committee about the health and environmental risks the open-air burning of brush and trash (lupya is the Chichewa term for it) that has been rampant in the BOMA and elsewhere (at least until the rainy season has come.)

-tried to fax the leave form but the first place I tried didn’t have a fax, they sent me to the district commissioner where it was out of order so I finally went to the Zamtel (government run company that handles land lines) office where there was a fax but the boss wasn’t in so I will need to try again Wednesday

-planted some more things then had dinner at dusk

2008-12-09

-late start (woke up at 6:30!)

-at about 10:00 I started working on clearing an area that I want to have fence put up around to have as a garden closer to my site. My wrist got a bit tired of all that slashing so I turned to raking what I had slashed into a compost pile until it started raining at 1430

-studied some Chichewa and cooked my squashy vegetable

2008-12-10

-went to the BOMA and successfully faxed my leave form

-got bananas and mangos from a rode side mini marketplace that has more then one salesperson on Wednesdays I guess because that is went most people get paid and so that is when there are more people selling things.

-went to the District Resource Center as dark clouds looked over head and called PC Lusaka to try to set up a home stay for the few days I’m in Lusaka around the new year.

-the rain that came never completely abated until I needed to leave so I put on all my gear a headed out. Of course, as soon as I got on the road the rain went away so by the end I was more wet from sweat then I would have been from rain had I not put on my gear.