Where's the Work?

Since my return from America, things have been fairly slow for me, work wise. I’ve heard I missed the brunt of cold season while overseas, but it is still chilly (high 50s) in the mornings and evenings. I enjoy the coolness much more than the African heat, but the worst part about cold season comes with the winds. In Mpika especially, the winds can be deafening, destructive, and painful. Biking becomes a tiring chore when your destination is against the blowing, and washing clothes seems almost pointless when the air comes at it hanging on the line, filled with dust. Not the mention the multitude of sweeping and dusting that comes with living in a house made of dirt and grass.

Another drawback of this dry time of year is the water situation. While I am lucky in the fact that my family’s well has stayed active (knock on wood), without fresh rain water seeping through, the result is a silty/clay filled water source. My PC issued water filter takes care of the gunk for my drinking water (albeit with consistently more cleaning of the filter elements called candles). However, when it comes to laundry, dishes, and bathing, the water starts out looking like it’s already been used for Pig Pen’s dirty clothes. The h20 has a milky, opaque color with all the sediment floating around. If I let it sit in my 20 liter jerrican for at least 2 days, the dirt will settle to the bottom (I don’t usually have time to wait around 2 days however). When bathing, I just try to think of all the sediment as an exfoliant, and not dirt making my bath rather pointless.

The reason work has been so slow is because people have finished harvesting their maize. Now, they pack it up in 50 kg plastic woven sacks and bring it to their area’s designated depot to sell. In the case of Luchembe, folks come to the storage shed near the school- essentially the center of the community. Here, a government chosen individual from the community is in charge of weighing the bags, redistributing the maize in government sacks, and keeping records of al maize brought in. Every year, the FRA (Food Reserve Agency- part of the government) sets a price for a 50 kg sack of maize. They buy these sacks by the million from farmers all across Zambia. After his maize has been weighed at the depot, a farmer is given a receipt for his transaction. Once the entire catchment of a depot is finished weighing and recording maize sales, the FRA will send trucks to pick up the sacks. Then, the farmers can go to town to a designated bank, show their receipt which must match the depot’s record, and be paid. In a lot of ways, this is a good system for small scale farmers because it is a sure-fire sale of their crop. However, the flaws are numerous as well. The weighing/recording process began in mid July and may continue until early October. After hauling their maize who knows how many kilometers, farmers often have to spend multiple days/nights at the depot waiting for their turn to have their maize weighed. The shed itself can only hold a few hundred sacks, so the overflow is placed outside on large spreads of logs to prevent rot of the crop. My counterpart, Lawrence has actually been employed as a guard at the shed. He sits up every night watching the huge piles of maize to make sure nothing is stolen. There was even a fence built to surround the area, showing just how crucial the security of this maize is. Lawrence has said people who have to camp out with their maize overnight become ornery and restless causing overdrinking and midnight brawls. Another problem can be the chosen individual who keeps all the records. Sometimes they can be corrupt and cheat people, or they can up and quit… The records themselves pose problems as well as in the case of last year when Lawrence never got his money from his maize because of clerical errors. While the government has told him he will receive both this year and last year’s sales come October, he is still nervous. For most families, this maize sale is their largest and sometimes only income for the year. They use it almost immediately to buy the government subsidized maize seed and fertilizer for planting in Oct/Nov. Some families, excited by the high set prices sell too much of their maize and end up without enough food for their family for the year. It also becomes complicated when farmer groups or cooperatives sell the yield the group worked on all season in terms of dividing the sale. Luckily, this has been an extremely plentiful maize season with a seemingly large bumper crop (making the famine in the horn of Africa seem even more sad and displaced from here). My family’s entire year of yard work resulted in selling 18, 50kg sacks of maize for 65,000 Zambian kwacha each, resulting in 1,170,000 kwacha (I receive about 1.5 million kwacha every month from PC). This converts to 99,000 pounds of maize for about $238 USD. The family is keeping 10 sacks for their personal consumption (as opposed to last year when they kept their entire yield of 5 sacks).

So, people are busy with that whole process, school has ended for the term (starting back up in September), and everything is too dry to do anything else with the land, leading me to be restless and anxious. I did teach my mayo how to bake bread recently which ended up being successful. Many women have seen me cooking or just straight out ask me to teach them how to bake. And while I am more than willing, I ask that they provide the ingredients, as I can’t always afford to bank roll cooking lessons. This condition usually leads to the person inquiring never to bring it up again. However, Poulin had pulled all the foodstuffs together, so we baked some really delicious village bread on the brazier (no easy feat, I assure you).

I’ve also made it my personal duty to teach some of my neighbor kids here a bit of English. I have become the local entertainment stop in the village with a multitude of soccer/kick balls, puzzles, crayons, music to dance to, paper, and most coveted of all…sweeties (candy). My first mission was to teach the children to say thank you (in Bemba) after receiving something from me. This was a devastatingly cute success. Now, I’m trying to get them to ask for the ball, crayons, etc. in English. Some have caught on quickly while others are still too shy to even look at me directly. I love these kids so much; I don’t know how I’m going to leave them in 8 months.

The next big excitement will come on September 20 with the national election here. People will be voting for their MP, President, and another local position I’m not sure of. The current leading MMD (multi-movement for democracy) party President, Rupiah Banda is running for his first full term in office (he became president when the previous leader died suddenly in 2008). There have only been 4 presidents of Zambia since its independence in 1964. Since 1991, the MMD has held the power. The opposition, Michael Sata of the PF (Patriotic Front) party is from Mpika, so most of the chatter I’ve heard has been for him. It really should be an interesting event to experience. While there is no violence/unrest expected during the election, PC is asking us to stay in our villages the week of the vote. It really is the safest place for us to be. Registered voters will go to the local schools to cast their vote. I wonder if there will be any coverage of the election in the states?

I recently received some pretty sad news from my brother. For reasons he can’t entirely explain, the Air Force (his employer) will not let him come visit me here in Zambia. It’s quite disappointing considering he was the only other visitor I was expecting. While having my parents come and stay for a while was excellent, I was really looking forward to showing my big brother around. My Zambian host family and counterpart are disappointed as well. They love it when I have visitors (even other PCVs). But to them, having an American family member come visit me is like they themselves hosting a visitor. They are so amazed that another white person from the same family as that other white person is coming to their little bush village in Zambia. I guess I’m lucky to have a Zambian family like them to lean on while my biological family is so far away.