Mutozi cwani!
The rains have blessed Zambia this year. Unfortunately, it's time for them to stop and they don't seem to want to. From word-of-mouth, I have heard that this has been the best rainy season in 20 years. In a drought-prone area, you would think that this would be great news! Unfortunately, it has rained so much that it looks like that harvest will only be fair at best this year. At least there will be a harvest unlike last year, but the yields do not look overly promising.
My task over the past six months has been promoting sorghum as a drought resistant crop to more than 600 farmers. We identified early on that a prolonged rainy season would be a big risk to our project. Sorghum requires one-third as much water as maize, but does not yield as much in heavy rainfall areas. Furthermore, sorghum grains are not protected by a husk like those of maize are. Therefore, when it keeps raining the grains will weather and turn black. This jeopardizes the quality of the sorghum and reduces the price it can command on the market.
However, it has rained so much this year that an interesting thing has happened. When a maize field floods, the plants turn yellow and stunt. If they don't die, the yields are greatly reduced. But when a sorghum field floods, the plants go into a dormant stage. As soon as the field dries out, they start growing again. Therefore, what the farmers have seen is that their sorghum is surviving where their maize is dying. Apparently, sorghum is more drought resistant and flood resistant than maize! One farmer even told me, "I wasted my time planting maize this year. Next year I will plant my entire field with sorghum!"
The most striking difference I have observed is between the farmers who planted early and those who planted late. Before I went home for Christmas, my training was aimed at encouraging early planting during the first three weeks of December. Late planting is the most common cause of crop failure in drought years. Moreover, sorghum is traditionally planted after maize because it is lower priority. Planting sorghum in December would be a significant behaviour change for many of these farmers.
Among the farmers I visited last month, over two-thirds of them planted in December. Many of them also tried planting in stations as per our training and most of the fields were weeded very well. Those who planted in December and kept their fields clean have excellent crops, far better then their maize. These same farmers will also be drinking their Eagle beer (which is where this sorghum will end up) while the others are chasing away birds in April! Birds are the primary pests of sorghum but they do not attack in large numbers until April and May. All of the farmers who planted in December told me they were happy with their decision.
The farmers who planted late in January seem to be divided into two camps. The first camp contains those who don't have access to oxen to plough their fields. Many woman-headed households have to borrow oxen from family members, who in turn will only lend them once they are finished ploughing their own fields. Many farmers have also lost their oxen to a disease outbreak that started in November. The other camp includes those who seem to firmly believe that sorghum will fail if planted in December. It is these farmers that will have to be convinced by results.
Overall, the response from the farmers has greatly exceeded expectations. Their excitement is overwhelming and has really filled me with a lot of motivation to work harder. But we're not out of the woods yet. The focus over the next three months will be ensuring that the farmers harvest and store their crop properly to ensure that it is commercially marketable. Many harvests are destroyed in the storage phase, so this is a formidable challenge. After that, it will be compiling the lessons learned from this pilot year and devising a scaling up strategy for next season. I am planning my own exit-strategy as well, and am in the process of laying the groundwork for another EWB volunteer to replace me!
Musiyale Hande (stay well),
Mike
Mutozi Cwani everyone!
No matter how hard I try to win, Zambia always seems to come out on top. This country, as wonderful as it is, is difficult to live in at times. The following is an account of an actual day I had last week. It is by no means an unusual day. In fact I would say that it's pretty indicative, albeit slightly on the extreme side, of the day-to-day challenges that hamper the productivity of a developing country.
I woke up at 6:30 in the morning and went to hop into my cold water shower (most people just use a bucket but we actually have a shower at my house), only there was no water. No big deal, the water is always on and off here. Actually I can't figure out why because it's the middle of the rainy season and I live minutes away from the fourth longest river in the world and the thundering Victoria Falls! But for some reason there's not enough water to be shared by Livingstone's 150,000 residents. This makes life much more difficult &45; no bathing, washing dishes, or washing clothes. The difference is that Zambians just shrug their shoulders and cope while most Canadians would surely panic and demand that someone fix the problem immediately!
So, I too shrugged my shoulders and went to work. My morning routine is to usually check my email and spend an hour in the office before heading out to the field to visit farmers. On this day, as for the previous three days, there was no power in the office, and hence no internet. I hopped back on my Honda 125cc motorbike and raced into town to use an internet café. There are three internet cafés in Livingstone and they all use the same service provider. On this day, that particular service provider was also down and Livingstone was shut off from the World Wide Web.
Down but not out, I went to get fuel for my bike but the Total filling station where CARE has an account was dry. Luckily the fuel truck was pulling into the station as I arrived but the attendant said it would take 90 minutes before I could fill up. And then she informed me that even with fuel, CARE had overdrawn its account and I could not get fuel until they paid. This typically happens twice per week because even though CARE is a huge international charity, cash flow is still a major constraint. I returned to the office to report this to our administrator and sat around with the two dozen staff also waiting for fuel to head off to the field. With no power I could not do anything there. With no fuel or money to buy it, I couldn't go to the field. Thus is life working in Zambia.
Things finally got straightened out by noon and we paid our fuel account at Total and I started "winning," as Zambians would say. It's common here to ask someone, "Are you winning?" My reply an hour ago would surely have been, "No!" but now I was definitely making progress. I had a full tank of gas and was cruising at 80 km/hr to an area called Katombora to visit a few sorghum farmers and see how their crops were doing. Zambia is notoriously famous for its horrendous roads that turn into rivers when it rains, but my daily 60 km commute is smooth, paved, and without traffic. I turned off the highway and completed the last 10 km on a bumpy gravel road that took me deep into the bush and down towards the Zambezi River. I nearly ran over a three foot long spitting cobra that was bolting across the road in front of me. Finally, I reached in Katombora only three hours late for my meeting with one of my contact farmers, Edwin Munene.
After begging for forgiveness and understanding, Edwin kindly pointed out that the rear tire on my bike was completely flat! I knew I was bound to get a puncture sooner or later, but I was out of cell phone range and 10 km from the highway. In other words, I was losing again. But the trick to Zambia is to never lose hope and keep persevering or this country will squash you like a bug. After a quick survey of my predicament, I discovered that I was very lucky to be next to a resort on the river called Treetops Lodge. Edwin and I pushed my bike to the front gate and inquired with the guard, whose name was Chrispin, if anyone could help me. Chrispin flashed a big grin and allowed us inside where we met two mechanics who had tools, a tire patch, and an air compressor. I was back into the "winning" column, illustrating how quickly your luck can change here!
An hour later, Edwin and I were off visiting sorghum farmers as originally planned. We managed to tour the fields of five farmers adjacent to the Zambezi. The soil in this area is very sandy without a lot of organic matter, which makes growing anything extremely difficult. With this season's above average rainfall, many of their seeds were washed away before they could take root, and my assessment of the sorghum crop was poor. But the farmers were optimistic and indicated that they wanted to try again next year.
When I said goodbye to Edwin, I made it back to the highway and stopped briefly to check my rear tire pressure. Once again, I found it half-deflated! The patch was not holding up. I was racing time now, with the sun beginning to lower in the horizon behind me. The bike was still rideable though, and I took it nice and slow back to Livingstone, stopping to check every 10 km to see if I had lost any more air. The tire held up (barely!) all the way back to Livingstone and I made it back to the office safe and sound. I was quite determined not to get stranded on this day!
The power was back at the office finally, but when I went to check my email again I found the internet to still be down. In fact, it was down for the next week and someone from Lusaka had to come and fix our satellite. I tried the cafés in town again, but Livingstone's internet still did not work. I decided to give up and let Zambia win this round and go home to relax. Of course at home there was still no water (and I was filthy from the field). Then the power went off. We cooked our dinner using charcoal and a little bit of water that we had to fetch from a working tap about two kilometers away. The candlelight dinner was nice though, with the topic of conversation being the great East Coast power outage in North America a couple years ago. I tried to explain to my Zambian family how the power had gone out for a few hours, literally crippling a large part of the continent. We all had a good laugh about how daily life in Zambia is a state of emergency in North America.
In the end, the power came back at home two days later. The water four days later. The internet at my office is once again functional, my gas tank is full again and I smell and look clean. But as I'm sitting here writing this, my motorbike rear tire is flat again (which is another story in itself), even after changing the tube. The battle versus Zambia continues. I may never win, but I am determined not to lose!
All the best,
Mike
Bwanji everyone,
I have decided that my next few updates will be centred on a few individuals that I have met in my field work over the last couple weeks in Zambia's Eastern and Southern provinces. The first one is the story of an extraordinary woman name Jennifer Mulengu from a town called Choma (4 hours south of Lusaka).
Jennifer Mulengu
"Something that took two years to build can take days to destroy," says Jennifer Mulengu, a 39 year-old farmer based just outside of drought-ravaged Choma in the Southern Province of Zambia. Her story is one of incredible entrepreneurial spirit that provides so much hope for the future of Zambia. But it is also an all too typical case of an empowered woman who just can't seem to get ahead in traditional African society.
Jennifer attended a workshop on soap making using the seed-oil from an uncommon plant called Jatropha. Her keen interest in agroforestry and desire to improve her livelihood on her own had already prompted her to experiment with such unknown plants when all her neighbours focused solely on growing rain-sensitive maize (corn) in the drought-prone region.
Following the workshop, she planted 1,500 Jatropha trees, most of which succumbed to termite attacks. This setback didn't slow her down though, and she started a farmer-training centre, where she taught others the benefits of Jatropha and how soap can be made from it. She also conducted peer workshops to diagnose common problems and generate solutions using a participatory approach. That's when she discovered that perceptions of problems were very different between men and women, leading her to include gender sensitization as part of the training.
The demand for the training was so great that she started building a guesthouse to accommodate visiting farmers using mud bricks hardened by her own hand-built kiln. She also wanted to set a positive example for those who attended these workshops, and started making improvements to her household; she built a fishpond to earn extra income and a compost toilet for human manure for her farm. Her latest project was an ox-cart to ease the haul of the annual maize crop.
Unfortunately, there was one person who didn't appreciate Jennifer's work: her husband. He became jealous of the attention being paid to her and took issue with the fact that she was undertaking work traditionally done by men. As a result, he took a second wife, common among men in the Tongan tribe. When he was transferred to teach at another school, Jennifer remained but his family forced her into a divorce and kicked her off the land.
"My husband was supportive [in the beginning] but the problem was he was a polygamist…I didn't want to move because my fellow women would see what happens when a woman is empowered. It was his decision to push me out."
She tells this story without a shred of hesitation or self-doubt. Her energy is infectious, and she possesses an aura as if she just knows that nothing can stop her now. But she faces an uphill battle in a society where the contributions of women are generally restricted to domestic labour and child bearing. Men traditionally control income and own land. Jennifer had no choice but to leave, now she must rebuild from scratch.
"When people are working as a couple, things are more for the man. But if you took a video camera at the beginning you would see who did everything - it was me. In the end, his relatives said I get nothing."
Now, all that is left is the skeleton of a training centre, a half-finished guesthouse, and rows upon rows of unharvested Jatropha trees. The sign at the entrance of the farm that proudly bares the name 'Jennifer Mulengu's Farmer Training Centre' still stands, but Jennifer is not there.
Organizations participating in development activities in traditional societies, particularly those aimed at empowering women must learn from stories like Jennifer's. Projects that lack a holistic approach and disregard cultural implications all too often fail because of reasons such as family conflict and husband jealousy. And the good intentions aimed at supporting people like Jennifer also run the risk of harming them if a thoughtful approach is not taken.
In the meantime though, Jennifer is not giving up and will continue to persevere. "I'm still continuing and sharing my knowledge with my fellow women," she says with a self-assuring tone. Her fellow women will surely appreciate the support.
Greetings from Lusaka, Zambia!
I will get straight to the point: I have arrived at the beginning of a drought.
My friends Paul Slomp and Dave Damberger, two other EWB volunteers welcomed me to "drought ridden Zambia" as I stepped off the plane, fresh from a two-day journey that took me through Chicago, Frankfurt, Johannesburg, and finally Lusaka. I had read about the lack of rain this year in Zambia and the government's decision to cease exports of maize (corn, the staple crop) because of a possible shortage. Over my first few days that was all everyone was talking about and the independent newspaper reported a shortage of 300,000 tonnes of maize with 60-75% crop failure. The government-run newspaper had apparently reported a "bumper harvest" a few weeks ago, but even they have had to wake up to the reality of the situation.
When Dave and I left the city for Siavonga at the head of Kariba Lake along the Zimbabwe border, I was shocked. I don't think I picked up my jaw from the floor of the minibus during the entire three hour trip. Not because of the shear beauty of the vast Zambian landscape, consisting of stunning hills and valleys - but because of the endless fields of dead, dry maize. I think most of you can picture a healthy field of corn - twelve-foot high stalks, lush green, and big juicy cobs. What I saw was endless fields of yellow, wilted, two-foot high stunted plants that were all dead. Most hadn't even attempted to develop cobs, and those that had didn't produce anything that could be harvested.
To put this in perspective, it is the end of the rainy season. The harvest is supposed to begin right now, and it will not rain again until November. This year, the rains (if any) stopped in January and all of the maize proceeded to die over the past two months. Everything is brown, and all of the rivers that I passed on my journey were bone dry. I can't imagine what things will look like in four months.
In Alberta, there has been a drought in the southern part of the province for the last few years that has crippled farmers. Although the severity of these two situations are likely very similar (with Alberta's probably being worse), the consequences are much more dire for the people of Zambia. In Canada, our diets are well balanced with a variety of food from all over the world. Our wealthy government is able to buy food from other regions and countries to make up for any shortfalls, farmers are often insured with some level of compensation, and there is a social safety net. When I read about the drought in Alberta, I did not witness anyone starving there.
Compare that situation to Zambia, where the majority of the population relies on maize for EVERY meal of the day. Consider that there is virtually no irrigation here whatsoever, and that nearly all rural dwellers are farmers that rely on one harvest of maize a year to feed their families and save enough money to last them until the next one. Because this is harvest time, last year's food and money has already run out. This is normally a time of excitement and happiness, feasting and replenishing hungry bellies, and repairing rain-damaged houses with farm income. But consider that the Red Cross is already handing out food aid to hungry people who have run out of last year's supplies, who will have to wait until next April with the hope of the next harvest. In the meantime, to be brutally honest, they will starve. Those lucky enough to receive food aid will likely have to survive on one meal a day, while those who can't will die.
This is the reality in which I will be living for the next 18 months. Compounded with an HIV/AIDS rate of 20%, and a life expectancy of 32.7 years, the situation in Zambia is urgent, reaffirming why I am here and the importance of EWB's work.
I wish I had happier things to write about in my first week here, but this is the reality of the situation that I have been thrust into.
Best regards,
Mike
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