Success Feels Splendid

As a volunteer in Zambia, I find myself constantly struggling with the reality of what I'm actually getting done over here. Most days drag by really slowly and I have to force myself to stay busy. Getting 'actual' work done is a frustration due to how slow everything runs. Motivation within the communities is also a big problem. You can't really blame the people, because life for them is hard. When the majority of your days are taken up with trying to produce enough food to just get by, taking the time to go to meetings voluntarily isn't a high priority. Naturally people want to see some instant improvements in their day to day lives and usually overlook the fact that knowledge actually leads to development. One of the most important tasks of volunteers in Zambia is just trying to motivate communities to want change and want knowledge.

As I said above, "Success feels splendid." I say this because I've devoted so much of my time in the village to trying to motivate my communities (I have 8) but don't usually feel like I've had much of an impact on them. But out of my eight villages, I have found 2 villages who show me time after time how eager they are to learn and actually want to try and change their positions in life.

The most recent example was a nutrition workshop I just put on in August in this particular village. I was lucky enough to find some free soya beans last year and I gave them to my Neighborhood Health Committee to grow. They harvested the beans in June and ended up tripling their yeild. This alone made me proud, because often even simple projects like this fail because of lack of cooperation between members. So the first day of the workshop we focused primarily on nutrition and malnutrition and all the ins and outs that go along with healthy diets.
The second day we had a full day of cooking demonstrations, mostly on cooking soya, and discussed the benefits of soya beans. That part was really a lot of fun. We made soya milk, soya sausages, soya flour, soya nshima, and different veggies with soya flour. Cabbage, cassava leaves, rape and wusi (some bitter wild green) to be exact. The gender roles were all over the place, it was great. Usually in Zambia the men steer clear of anything cooking related, but the men in the NHC were very eager to learn all the mechanics of all the dishes. They even had the women teach them how to pound the soya flour and cassava leaves, and learned how to properly pick the leaves off the cassava plant. It was really cool to see both the men and women working together in the "kitchen." Most men get pretty severely ridiculed in the village if they are seen doing a 'woman's job.'

But the most gratifying part of it all was that at the end of the workshop, the participants were very adamant about assuring me that what I had taught them would be put into practice ASAP. They were begging me to type up everything we had gone over so they could always be referring back to it. I guess the main reason I'm writing about this experience is that it is like a breath of fresh air to me. After so many disappointments in the village, I do struggle to keep my own moral up at times and having these two villages really convince me that they took something from what I taught them was just what I needed. And I'm happy that it was nutrition that they took something from. Not that other sujbects I train on (TB,Malaria,etc) aren't important, but I feel like malnutrition is the ONE thing they really have control over. You can sleep under a mosquito net and cover your body completely at night but still catch malaria. You can take all the precautions to aviod TB and still get it (believe me on this one!). But malnutrition is the one major problem in the village that can be controlled pretty easily with proper knowledge on the subject and planning ahead. As I tell the villagers, nobody is going to come and feed your kids for you. The health center won't give your kid food, its YOU (the parents) to conqueor this problem and now you have the knowledge to do so. So...lets all keep our fingers crossed that the information spreads like wildfire! or bushfire in my case!

My Majina-Namesake

Life in the village has been pretty entertaining lately! Somehow I've managed to keep my self very busy. I know I've been busy based on the number of books I get read in a week and my last 2 weeks in the village, I haven't read ANY books, well other than my "Nutrition and Diet Therapy" textbook I recently acquired from another volunteer. Between living in the bush, having dreds, and my newly found borderline obsession with nutrition I'm becoming quite the little tree hugger:) But to my fellow Kansans who might be reading: don't worry I don't think I'll ever reach the vegetarian status!

But on to more exciting topics. The coolest thing that has happened in my life recently was having a baby named after me. There is one family who lives in a neighboring village that I work with whom I absolutely adore. They treat me like one of their own and in all reality, I don't think I would have been able to stick out my time here without them. The father is my closest counterpart and closest friend in the village, and the mother is a sweetheart.

So Mama was pregnant and due in July. I was hoping she would have a boy because out of their 6 kids, only one boy so far and he was the first born. I also assumed the baby would have a religious type name because of the line-up of kids already. They have a Blessings, Gospel, Glorify & Thanks already. So when I returned from my vacation with Mom,Dad, Gma & Gpa, I was suprised to find a little baby girl, born on July 2 (3 days away from my birthday) named Tamra.

In Zambia, having a baby named after you is a really big honor actually. Usually here when a baby is named after someone they take the baby to that person a day or so after the birth and have a celebration in honor of that namesake or in Lunda they call it majina. But I wasn't around until about a week or two after the birth, so they didn't show off baby Tamra until I came back! Then we had a small celebration, killed a chicken, and drank some monkoyo, which is like a sweet maize drink.

It is cool to know that I've been able to make at least a small impact on someone's life, little as it may be, its somewhere to start.

What does all work & no play equal?

I guess I'm not a dull girl after all!

Whoops! It has been practically forever since I've jotted anything down here. My apologies! Between being somewhat busy, slow & annoying internet, and confusion on what people really want to hear about, I somehow forgot to update! A lot has been going on with me since my last update in October! I guess I should begin with work before rambling about the play!

Rainy season is upon us here in Zambia, which means 2 things:
1) People have shifted to their fields (about 1 hour walk from the villages) so they can really put in the hours of work needed to produce enough crop to sustain themselves for the year &
2) LOTS OF RAIN!

My Garden

Both things are definitely positive, but at times can make my life & job in the village incredibly frustrating. During rainy season the village is quiet, people are busy making a living, and only come back into town on Sundays for church. Meetings can be cancelled for weeks on end, if it happens to rain on the day it’s scheduled. But amidst all these fall backs, we are still managing to make some progress!

Back in November I took one of my "counterparts" to an HIV/AIDS workshop put on by Peace Corps in town. I was only allowed to take one person, which was a hard choice for me to make, considering I work with 8 different villages and many different people. But the man that accompanied me, was actually an excellent choice. I have never seen anyone I work with SO excited, motivated, & ready to learn as this particular man.

After the training, we sat down together and made a plan of action for what we were going to do back in the village. Long story short, we decided that our overall goal was to bring voluntary counseling and testing (VCT) to the villages in our area. This may sound easy, but in reality it takes careful planning & execution to make VCT worthwhile. Most the people living in our area have never been tested, because testing isn’t available at our Rural Health Center. The closest place for people to go for VCT is the District Health Center, which is a good 160km from my village, and virtually impossible to reach with public transport. Another setback to VCT is that there are still many myths in the village relating to the actual testing procedures. For example, many people believe that when the testers come, they take the blood back to the district and use it for JuJu or witchcraft.
In order to overcome all these drawbacks to VCT, we decided to do a catchment wide program sensitizing all our communities on the importance of knowing one’s status and addressing all the apprehensions people might have to testing. Our hope is that we can bring out mobile VCT to a big cultural festival that happens every year around June at the cave near my house, and in a sense, use the festival to promote HIV/AIDS prevention & testing.

That being the biggest project I am working on right now, there are also a few secondary projects trying to take way. With my help, one of my Neighborhood Health Committees has recently started a soya bean project to aid orphans and vulnerable children. Harvest should take place some time around May, so I am keeping my fingers crossed on this project, because in theory it could really make a huge impact on the health of all the people in my area. Meat is hard to come by in the village and very expensive. For this reason there is a huge problem with protein deficiency, especially in children. Soya beans actually provide more protein than meat and are much easier and inexpensive to grow. Once the first harvest is underway, we will do cooking demonstrations with the women to show the numerous ways soya can be used to enrich the foods they already eat, as well as introduce recipes, like soya milk.

The other two noteworthy projects I’ve been working on over the past several months involve two of my Farmer’s Cooperatives. The farmers in my area work only by man power, putting an unfortunate restriction on their output. One group had the idea to write a grant proposal to acquire a set of cattle to help them out with their labor, while the other is writing a proposal for tractors. The second of the two is the most ambitious because bringing that kind of equipment into the bush takes a lot of planning on the groups part. But so far they have a wonderful comprehensive proposal written, and it’s up to me to find the money! If this project succeeds, it also has the potential to completely revolutionize the farming system in our area.

Now…on to play!
I am definitely trying to take advantage of the fact that I am LIVING in Africa! Over Christmas and New Years I took a 3 week trek through southern Africa with 3 of my friends. Overall we saw 4 different countries and experienced a wide range of terrain! I’ll just give you the highlights:
1) South Africa: We really only spent time in big cities, Jo-burg & Durban, which was a much-needed taste of the developed world!
2) Lesotho: Here we did a 3 day horse back ride through the beautiful, rugged mountains, which proved to be one of the most relaxing times on the whole vacation.
3) Swaziland: Gorgeous lush mountains and valleys welcomed us to this gem of South Africa. I saw my first 3 of the big 5! Elephants, Rhinos & Lions!
4) Mozambique: Spending New Years on the beach was definitely the highlight of the whole trip. Although I didn’t get to go scuba-diving or snorkeling with the great whites, due to a storm off the coast of Madagascar, I did find the time to try surfing & play in the enormous waves!

The most recent vacation I took was quite a bit shorter, but equally as thrilling! My good buddy and I took a 3 day train ride to Tanzania, to hit up Zanzibar for a music festival. The train ride there was quite the experience, good & bad. We were both sick & the stinky toilets and frequent jerky stops didn’t help that matter much. But the plus was that we got to enjoy the beautiful scenery of Tanzania, including the Great Rift Valley. Part of the way we were going through a game park, where we got to see elephants, giraffes, wildebeest, zebras, etc. It felt as though you were experiencing them in the true wild!

Once we reached Zanzibar, a small island off the coast of Tanzania, the good times kept rolling. We were both feeling much better by that time! Zanzibar has some of the most amazing beaches in the world, with the white sand and blue waters you can’t find anywhere else. Inland is very lush, with monkeys running here and there. We spent most of our time (4 days) in Stonetown, a port city, where the music festival was being held. The days we spent exploring the narrow little back streets with vendors selling Zanzibar’s famous scarves & all sorts of other things a tourist might love, while the evenings we spent relaxing on a lawn in an old fort listening to the sounds of Africa. The artists came from all over Africa & beyond, most playing some type of Afro-beat sound. Probably some of the best, most unique music I’ve heard yet! Our last day in Zanzibar, we spent on Paje beach, napping and collecting shells. Interestingly, the tide at the beach was so low in the morning, that you could walk about a mile or two out into the ocean, water about knee/ankle deep, before you would reach the waves. Maybe it’s the inexperienced Kansas girl in me, but I’d never seen such a phenomenon!

So now that you see how busy I’ve been over the past several months, I hope you can forgive me for not getting a post up sooner!