Same same

My time here in Zambia is coming to an end. If there’s one thing that this trip has confirmed it’s that we’re all the same.

I’ve written a lot of about the differences I’ve experienced here. They are many. They are interesting. They can be surprising. They can be frustrating.

But the reality is that as many differences as there are between countries and cultures, there are infinitely many similarities. We are all people. We love to smile. We love to laugh. We love to love.

It’s easy to ignore what makes us the same and simply focus on the few things that make us different. Let’s stop doing that.

UPDATE: Stanley

Just want to give a quick update on Stanley.

He was able to obtain a loan. He has started his chicken business while still working full time at the organic garden. He has a solid business plan.

I visited his place right before I left and it’s looking good. He’s up to 20 chickens and has about 40 eggs brooding. The chickens roam free during the day and have a temporary coop for sleeping but Stanley is busy building a permanent coop right now. It’s all pretty exciting.

Stanley, king of the chickens

 

 

Feeding the chickens in the temporary coop

 

New coop being built

 

 

In a weird turn of events, I was given a chicken as a going away present at a party they threw me in Sinazeze. I debated just having a delicious dinner, but Little Jerry Seinfeld is probably very grateful of his new home at Stanley’s.

Best buds

 

I see in Little Jerry Seinfeld the unlimited future I once had

 

How to you transport a chicken? In a bag of course

Social cynicism

I promised a while ago that I’d talk about social enterprise. I also promised it would be cynical. I’m a man of my word.

I’ve been trying to figure out what makes a social enterprise here in Zambia. I think I got it.

A social enterprise in Zambia is a business where a westerner is involved.

That’s really the best I can come up with. I can’t see any other major difference between a typical business here compared to a social enterprise. A local artisan making some knick knacks for the tourist market is just running a business but add a westerner and some clever marketing and suddenly you have a social enterprise. A group of farmers selling their harvest at a local market are self employed but as soon as an NGO comes in and forms a “cooperative”, it’s now a social enterprise.

Take that however you wish.

Litterbug

I adapt pretty well to wherever I am. When in Rome and whatnot. But if there’s one thing I  can’t adapt to here in Zambia it’s how to deal with garbage. I simply can’t get myself to follow the locals and throw it on the ground. I’ll happily throw a banana peel out a bus window, but can’t do the same to a biscuit wrapper.

Many towns and villages in Zambia are just covered with litter. Ditches are full of pop bottles, Chibuku cartons, and various wrappers. It doesn’t look very nice.

Other places have less garbage around. Where does it go? Likely it’s getting burnt. Piles of garbage are often seen burning all around the country (see Andrea’s post about fire). I also just found out what happens to my garbage at the farm once it’s taken away from my house. It’s brought to a landfill where it’s later burnt.

That made me wonder. What’s better? Having piles of garbage around towns and on the side of roads, or getting rid of it by burning it. One is bad for the landscape, the other releases pollutants to the atmosphere. Obviously none are ideal options, but they are the reality right now. Maybe I should start throwing my garbage into a ditch instead of bringing it home so it can be burnt.

Choo

My trip to Zimbabwe included a train trip. I love trains! There’s nothing like sitting by a window and watching the world go by.

The train went from Bulawayo to Victoria Falls. It was an overnight train. Andrew and I got a sleeper for the low price of $12.

You can tell that the train was once luxurious. It was built in the 50’s and although it’s now run by the National Railroad of Zimbabwe (NRZ), it still retains some of its original branding of the Rhodesian Railroad (RR). Now it’s run down, in desperate need of some loving.

Just as we were warned, the train was severely delayed. We left on time, but managed to lose many hours on the way. No worries, there’s no rush. More time to sit in the bar car, drinking a few beers in the evening and coffee in the morning, while chatting with some fellow passengers. The train goes through some beautiful scenery, including Hwange National Park where I saw an elephant and plenty of baboons. There’s no better way to arrive at Victoria Falls, seeing a glimpse of the gorge and the mist from the falls as you pull into the station.

They grow up so fast

The last couple weeks I’ve been away from my “home” in Siansowa. I’ve been staying with a host family of sorts. They’re not quite a host family, but Andrew and I are working with them on our project and have therefore been staying with them in Sinazeze, a town about an hour and half from Siansowa. I’m sleeping in a tent, but all our meals are eaten with the family. They’ve treated us great. I’d be getting fat if I stayed here much longer.

The family consists of Foster and Irene and their 3 kids. Other relatives are always around, adults and kids.

Foster and Irene had to go away to a funeral for a few days. They took their young baby with them. This left Chocho, a 12 or 13 year old girl, and Lulu, a 5 or 6 year old boy, by themselves at home. Sure, they’re not completely on their own, they have relatives around, but they have to manage the day-to-day by themselves.

Chocho’s a rockstar. Even with her parents around, she’s always working. Cooking, cleaning, fetching water, taking care of the baby and countless other household chores. While the boys are off gallivanting  and causing ruckus, the girls are at home working. It doesn’t seem fair. I feel guilty when I’m sitting on a couch and a 13 year old girl is waiting on me, bringing me tea and fritters.

Now that she’s in charge of the household, she’s taken it to the max. When she’s not at school, not only is she taking care of her little brother (and also her little cousin of about the same age), cooking for him, cleaning up after him, making sure he gets ready for school and giving him a bath, but she’s taking care of Andrew and I as well. She’s cooking for us (I love her cooking, she only uses moderate amounts of salt), cleaning the house, even heating up the water for my bucket bath. She’s great.

I have no problem with kids helping out around the house (of course I had a problem with it while I was a kid). I do have a problem with the inequalities between boys and girls here. Girls are expected to help out around the house and take care of their younger siblings starting at a very young age. Boys seem to get to just hang around, doing whatever they want. Boys get to kids. Girls seem to lose their childhood very early on.

Don’t get me wrong, Chocho is still a kid. She likes playing volleyball at school, she likes running around with friends, she likes to have fun. She’s just a kid with adult responsibilities.

I wonder what the situation here would look like if the genders of the kids were reversed. If the older kid was a boy and the younger one was a girl.

Chocho taking care of her little niece

chorwe without borders

It took a while, but I now have a Tonga name: Chorwe.

It means luck.

I’m not sure why I was given this name. I met a guy on the street, talked to him for about a minute, and he declared that my name was Chorwe. He was pretty adamant about it.

I think he got it right. I’m a pretty lucky guy.

Pump it up

EWB loves using buzzwords. “Systemic change” is one of them. It’s a good thing.

Recently I got to see a well known international NGO (I’m not going to name names) set up a borehole pump for the local community. The borehole already existed but had been unused for years due to a broken pump. Sounds good. The community needed a borehole to get water. Water is life.

But it’s not an example of systemic change. Instead, the NGO comes in, installs the pump and leaves.

All the parts from the pump are made in the USA and shipped here. What about the local pump/pipe makers? You’re taking jobs out of the country and not developing local talent. You’re paying more for a pump shipped across the world and you’re creating a dependency on parts coming from elsewhere. I’m not sure about this, but I would think that there’s a good chance that a pump and the pipes from the USA would use imperial sizes. Zambia uses metric. So you wouldn’t be able to find compatible parts here even if you wanted to.

What happens when the pump breaks? Who is going to fix it? There’s no community ownership. Is  the NGO going to do it? What if they’ve left the area? I guess it’s sustainable for the NGO since they are making sure they are always needed.

It’s a tough call. One one hand, the community needed water and this NGO provided it. But they haven’t really solved the issue, only the symptom, and only temporarily.

Easy as 1, 2, 3

It’s the little differences.

I’ve been hanging out with some kids a lot lately. They like to make funny faces at me and say the few English words that they know. I’ve taught them how to high five. They’re pretty awesome.

Today one of them, Lulu, started singing. I didn’t pay much attention, but I recognized the tune. It took me a long time to realize that I recognized the lyrics too. He was singing the alphabet.

What threw me off was the tune. I’m so used to singing the alphabet to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”. Here, kids sing it to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne” (you might know it better as “The New Years Song”). It sounded completely foreign.

To be honest, it seems better. It’s easier to differentiate between letters. “Elemenopee” is no longer a letter of the alphabet.

I also like the way it ends. “X, Y, Z, Zambia, Stop.”

Cram ‘em in

Transport in Zambia is normally pretty good. It goes to most places you’d want to go, it’s easy to figure out (someone will always help you get where you need to go, even if you didn’t ask for help), and it’s somewhat affordable. It’s perfect as long as you can forego any semblance of legroom and aren’t too attached to the concept of personal space.

Allow me to introduce you to one a common mode of transport in Zambia. The mini-bus. They go almost everywhere. They’re all painted blue and white.

A mini-bus will generally only leave when it’s full. There are no schedules. With the price of fuel at about $2 CAD per litre, they can’t afford to leave unless they have enough paying customers. When there are no other options, this can mean waiting for a while. For some reason, they often want you to sit inside while you wait instead of just hanging around outside and being comfortable. Sometimes you luck out and are the one that fills it up and you leave right away. Other times you’re the first one there and have to wait around for hours.

The term mini-bus is slightly misleading. In Canada this would be considered a van. It’s small, but four rows of seats are crammed behind the front row. The legal limit for passengers is 14. Three people in each row and two in the front. I’ve never seen this rule followed. Instead, the normal is 4 people per row (even this rule is sometimes ignored). That’s all well and good, but you have to remember that kids don’t count as people. So it’s four adults and however many kids belong to those adults per row. Plus bags full of stuff. Plus chickens and goats if they need to go for a ride (those go under the seats).

I’ve counted up to 25 people in a mini-bus.

A mini bus travels with both a driver and a conductor, in charge of collecting money and cramming people in. I like to think they’re best-friends. Sometimes while waiting for it to fill, the conductor will contract out the job of finding customers and receiving payment to someone else while he goes and does whatever it is conductors do in their spare time. It seems that contractors sometimes either try to skim some extra money for themselves or make some kind of miscalculation. It doesn’t help when the contractor is already drunk at 9 in the morning (unfortunately common). This causes arguments (and sometimes fights) that delay departure and annoy me.

While not perfect, I’d love if there was a similar system for getting between cities in Canada.