Zambia Journal - Aug 10, 2005
Here it is Wednesday and this is the first chance I’ve had to write since last time.
Amazingly my lack of two nights sleep at the beginning has allowed me to slip straight into the Zambian time zone for sleep and food. The only disturbance to sleeping is the fact that we have a family of cats living in the roof space. They don’t make too much noise but are freaking out one of the girls in the group who is afraid of cats. I’m trying to convince her that they are some other animal, but so far no luck.
Monday was quite a day. We started with a meeting of about 40 people. The coordinators we have been working with here in Zambia. The leaders of the each community project and representatives from their boards and the communities themselves, youth from a school we are trying to connect with and a few invited guests. The aim as it now turns out was to over schedule ourselves for the first week or so. But we’ll get to that later. It was nice to actually meet some of the people face to face and get a chance to see and hear some of the issues they are dealing with.
We broke for lunch and then went to the Garden Compound. What to say about the Garden Compound – this is one of the poorer communities in Lusaka. Over the last few months I have steeled myself to expect the worse and this pretty much met my expectations. When you look at a map, this community of several thousand people is situated between the Lusaka sewage plant and the sewage settling pools. Even though it is dry season the bus had great difficulty in getting to the community center we were headed for. One rain and the trip by bus would be out of the question. There were hundreds of people, and huge numbers of kids walking around. Bernadette Sikanyika’s car (the Zambian coordinator) is normally the only vehicle seen in this area, so the bus following it caused quite a stir.
Our arrival at the community center blew me away. We were greeted by 30 or so teachers and children, singing to welcome us in the friendliest manner possible. My emotions swung all over the place. Here we were being greeted like royalty, smiles all around us and yet at the same time I could not help but notice the swarms of children, filthy bare footed but all beaming with pleasure. One small girl standing on a 4 foot high pile of construction dirt held out her hand not in a begging mode but as a handshake so I took hers in mine and I the had to shake the hands of two or three dozen more smiling giggling kids. Those of us who had digital cameras took photos and the kids loved seeing their own images when we showed it too them so everyone was clambering to get their photo taken. The welcoming choir stopped and we decided to sing back to them the only song we all knew, “This Little Light of Mine”. Corny, but they loved it.
After a few short welcoming speeches we went in to see the building we had come to help renovate, a 60-ft by 30 ft cement block building with 7 smallish rooms plus a bathroom and toilet. The building was in bad shape and had been purchased using money donated by CWB. They had done a tremendous amount to get it in to reasonable shape from a structural perspective. A high wall all around for safety, two rooms completely re-plastered, a door or two moved to make flow easier, door frames in, but no doors, window frames in, but no glass, roof repaired almost completely, with asbestos sheeting naturally. They are also in the process of digging two large holes that occupy most of the side portion of the property, one for raw sewage the other and soak away – primitive but better than the hole in the back wall that was the old method. The remnants if this can still be seen as a mound which is about 3 feet higher than the surrounding land and 18 inches higher than the well hole which is about 15 feet away and 5 feet deep – I can only imagine what this was like in the rainy season. The improvement we hope to make is to pay for and bring in the water from the water line that is nearby it actually runs right across the top of the two aforementioned holes.
We talked about what needs done for a while, water, toilet discharge, final roofing, painting, security gate for the front entrance to the property and a myriad of other small and big stuff. Then we left to get on the bus and when I asked someone how to say see-you tomorrow in Nyanja, my interpretation for them all caused a riot of laughter. Getting the bus out was quite an interesting experience that repeats itself every time we leave. The bus is followed by hundreds of screaming, laughing boys and girls racing the bus. On the dirt roads some of them trail it, some of them race along side and some run in front. All we can do is keep our fingers crossed.
The evening turned out to be very interesting. The NGO we are working with in the Garden Compound, found someone to sponsor a meal with entertainment put on by local drummers and dancers, and award winning short plays put on by local youth for AIDS education and the like. I hope the pictures of me dancing are all blurred. The ZANCOB coordinator we are working with is a very savvy women. All of the leaders in these organizations are women. Bernadette had everyone’s seating arranged perfectly. Our kids were with Zambian OVCs (get to know the term – Orphans and Vulnerable Children), our leader was sat down with two ministers from the Kenneth Kuanda Government, who had led Zambia to Independence, others were sat down with leaders from the communities and boards of the NGOs. Dick Bail (our nominal leader) and Bethany and myself were interviewed by a Radio Phoenix reporter. We had a wonderful evening and got to know some people well on day one.
I awoke on Tuesday refreshed and ready to go. We went several ways, via the same bus, dropping half of us off at Garden again. While most of the group was doing some ESL (English as a Second Language) teaching I went shopping. Each ESL pair form our group went into these preschool classrooms with the volunteer teacher and about 10 kids – remember the rooms are about 10 by 10 max. They had a great time and the kids seemed to love every minute of it, mostly because they did less “by rote” work than is the normal. You’ll also have picked up that they are in this building without doors, glassed, window, complete roof or anything else in fact. They sit on a nylon sack cut open so it covers more area which is right on the cement floor. That’s why we are here – to understand the exact situation these poor communities face with families of 10 orphaned kids often living with a single “aunt” or grandmother. In this especially poor compound some of these families are classed as “child headed” meaning the oldest is sixteen of younger.
Now while the ESL was going on I was out shopping. My allocation from CWB was 2,000,000 kwacha (about $400). First stop was for a large metal gate you see everywhere here, to put across the entrance to the Community Centre property. The process involves driving down a road lined with building materials laid out along the side. To show how the economy works- to earn some money you see many men sitting by a pallet of large stones maybe twelve inches square and pounding them down to small building stone an inch or two square. Bernadette drove down the road stopping and haggling with each gate maker she came across haggling with him to get him down to a fair price. It did not help that I was in the passenger seat, the white man always has the money and is rich so prices jump quite dramatically. Anyway the transaction ended with me making my first 1,000,000 transaction. 1.1 million kwatcha or $440. We left Shinyengu our foreman to go back with the gate and headed for the paint store.
This took us through the wonderful downtown Lusaka traffic. The traffic was a crazy as you’d see in many places but Bernadette is not the most comfortable person behind the wheel. And pedestrians here are simply suicidal. No one died and we got there eventually. The choice was not easy, Bernadette wanted dark paint because of dirt but the cheapest was light paint because pigment is expensive. SO we eventually decided on Champagne, a less appropriate colour for this situation I cannot imagine. As we left, three guys who had approached us on the way in asked again on the way out if they could paint. They started at KW600,000 and ended at KW200,000 with us pushing them out of the car. Now while we were in the store B got a call from Ruth the radio reporter I had already spoken too who wanted to do a live broadcast from the compound, so we went by to pick her up and take her with us.
Between Bethany and I being interviewed live via cell phone and the gate makers reneging on their agreement to install the gate (I’ve never quiet understood the issue but anyway they simply got back in their van and left), no painting got done that morning. We left and I spent the afternoon trying to recuperate from the events since I left Boston. A group of us worked hard into the evening in order to get schedule documented for the rest of our time since we found that we had been over booking ourselves. Remember I am writing about me experience but we have 18 people going in 3 different directions at any one moment. The organization chart has been great ever since, I’m even taking pictures of its evolution.
We started off Wednesday by dropping of one contingent at the Kabulonga School, which is an elite school in the country and we had arranged for our youth to meet with their youth for an AIDS Peer Education discussion. This was in a whole different world than most of Lusaka we have seen so far.
My team went to start the painting in Garden. We tied to clean the walls but they didn’t have a brush so we used a roller pad I had brought. When we all proved about 18inches too short so Mary the project co-coordinator went to find a ladder – it came back – two long pieces of rotten wood with a few irregularly placed pieces or varying lengths for the rungs. Shinyengu took one look at the ladder and one at me and delicately suggested it might not be wise to use it. Later Bernadette arrived with a small aluminium ladder from her home and we were able to get the first coat of paint on the largest room. We even taught Mary to paint.
While waiting for our bus we ventured father a field into the compound. Friendly people, very friendly kids and total poverty everywhere. The kids are hilarious when they see a camera, when you start to take a photo of one you have 10 before the shutter closes, and 25 before the second shot is take. And they love to see their own image in the lcd viewer of our digital cameras. Justine and Georgette took me over to see the tavern and the bar they had been telling me about. As far as I can make out these two shacks are differentiated by the size of the “glass”. The bar has regular cups; the tavern drinkers appear to use a bucket. The other choice is the home brew being cared for by a flock of older kids. I was offered a hip size bottle of the warm stuff but refused.
In the afternoon we went back with a larger crew and when we got there they women had already started to fill the holes in the walls and clean the other rooms. I set my crew to work and was pulled away by B so I could buy some more provisions. She is doing this to prove to me that she is being economical with CWB money by buying at the best prices. She even took me by another metalworker to show me a gate the same as we had bought, but this one was twice as expensive. She even told the metal smith to hand over his book of records so that she could show me that he was selling one of Zambia’s ministers less money for gates than her. Bernadette is quite a force. By the time I got back the painters were finishing off for the day.
What can I say about the cats? We are living in two nice villas but sad to say our has has the problem of a couple of cats living in our attic. And as you know cats are nocturnal and we are not. This has caused a few problems with people who are scared of cats and even though I tried to convince them that they are Feral Dogs or an African Bush Opossum.
We still have a problem.
Amazingly my lack of two nights sleep at the beginning has allowed me to slip straight into the Zambian time zone for sleep and food. The only disturbance to sleeping is the fact that we have a family of cats living in the roof space. They don’t make too much noise but are freaking out one of the girls in the group who is afraid of cats. I’m trying to convince her that they are some other animal, but so far no luck.
Monday was quite a day. We started with a meeting of about 40 people. The coordinators we have been working with here in Zambia. The leaders of the each community project and representatives from their boards and the communities themselves, youth from a school we are trying to connect with and a few invited guests. The aim as it now turns out was to over schedule ourselves for the first week or so. But we’ll get to that later. It was nice to actually meet some of the people face to face and get a chance to see and hear some of the issues they are dealing with.
We broke for lunch and then went to the Garden Compound. What to say about the Garden Compound – this is one of the poorer communities in Lusaka. Over the last few months I have steeled myself to expect the worse and this pretty much met my expectations. When you look at a map, this community of several thousand people is situated between the Lusaka sewage plant and the sewage settling pools. Even though it is dry season the bus had great difficulty in getting to the community center we were headed for. One rain and the trip by bus would be out of the question. There were hundreds of people, and huge numbers of kids walking around. Bernadette Sikanyika’s car (the Zambian coordinator) is normally the only vehicle seen in this area, so the bus following it caused quite a stir.
Our arrival at the community center blew me away. We were greeted by 30 or so teachers and children, singing to welcome us in the friendliest manner possible. My emotions swung all over the place. Here we were being greeted like royalty, smiles all around us and yet at the same time I could not help but notice the swarms of children, filthy bare footed but all beaming with pleasure. One small girl standing on a 4 foot high pile of construction dirt held out her hand not in a begging mode but as a handshake so I took hers in mine and I the had to shake the hands of two or three dozen more smiling giggling kids. Those of us who had digital cameras took photos and the kids loved seeing their own images when we showed it too them so everyone was clambering to get their photo taken. The welcoming choir stopped and we decided to sing back to them the only song we all knew, “This Little Light of Mine”. Corny, but they loved it.
After a few short welcoming speeches we went in to see the building we had come to help renovate, a 60-ft by 30 ft cement block building with 7 smallish rooms plus a bathroom and toilet. The building was in bad shape and had been purchased using money donated by CWB. They had done a tremendous amount to get it in to reasonable shape from a structural perspective. A high wall all around for safety, two rooms completely re-plastered, a door or two moved to make flow easier, door frames in, but no doors, window frames in, but no glass, roof repaired almost completely, with asbestos sheeting naturally. They are also in the process of digging two large holes that occupy most of the side portion of the property, one for raw sewage the other and soak away – primitive but better than the hole in the back wall that was the old method. The remnants if this can still be seen as a mound which is about 3 feet higher than the surrounding land and 18 inches higher than the well hole which is about 15 feet away and 5 feet deep – I can only imagine what this was like in the rainy season. The improvement we hope to make is to pay for and bring in the water from the water line that is nearby it actually runs right across the top of the two aforementioned holes.
We talked about what needs done for a while, water, toilet discharge, final roofing, painting, security gate for the front entrance to the property and a myriad of other small and big stuff. Then we left to get on the bus and when I asked someone how to say see-you tomorrow in Nyanja, my interpretation for them all caused a riot of laughter. Getting the bus out was quite an interesting experience that repeats itself every time we leave. The bus is followed by hundreds of screaming, laughing boys and girls racing the bus. On the dirt roads some of them trail it, some of them race along side and some run in front. All we can do is keep our fingers crossed.
The evening turned out to be very interesting. The NGO we are working with in the Garden Compound, found someone to sponsor a meal with entertainment put on by local drummers and dancers, and award winning short plays put on by local youth for AIDS education and the like. I hope the pictures of me dancing are all blurred. The ZANCOB coordinator we are working with is a very savvy women. All of the leaders in these organizations are women. Bernadette had everyone’s seating arranged perfectly. Our kids were with Zambian OVCs (get to know the term – Orphans and Vulnerable Children), our leader was sat down with two ministers from the Kenneth Kuanda Government, who had led Zambia to Independence, others were sat down with leaders from the communities and boards of the NGOs. Dick Bail (our nominal leader) and Bethany and myself were interviewed by a Radio Phoenix reporter. We had a wonderful evening and got to know some people well on day one.
I awoke on Tuesday refreshed and ready to go. We went several ways, via the same bus, dropping half of us off at Garden again. While most of the group was doing some ESL (English as a Second Language) teaching I went shopping. Each ESL pair form our group went into these preschool classrooms with the volunteer teacher and about 10 kids – remember the rooms are about 10 by 10 max. They had a great time and the kids seemed to love every minute of it, mostly because they did less “by rote” work than is the normal. You’ll also have picked up that they are in this building without doors, glassed, window, complete roof or anything else in fact. They sit on a nylon sack cut open so it covers more area which is right on the cement floor. That’s why we are here – to understand the exact situation these poor communities face with families of 10 orphaned kids often living with a single “aunt” or grandmother. In this especially poor compound some of these families are classed as “child headed” meaning the oldest is sixteen of younger.
Now while the ESL was going on I was out shopping. My allocation from CWB was 2,000,000 kwacha (about $400). First stop was for a large metal gate you see everywhere here, to put across the entrance to the Community Centre property. The process involves driving down a road lined with building materials laid out along the side. To show how the economy works- to earn some money you see many men sitting by a pallet of large stones maybe twelve inches square and pounding them down to small building stone an inch or two square. Bernadette drove down the road stopping and haggling with each gate maker she came across haggling with him to get him down to a fair price. It did not help that I was in the passenger seat, the white man always has the money and is rich so prices jump quite dramatically. Anyway the transaction ended with me making my first 1,000,000 transaction. 1.1 million kwatcha or $440. We left Shinyengu our foreman to go back with the gate and headed for the paint store.
This took us through the wonderful downtown Lusaka traffic. The traffic was a crazy as you’d see in many places but Bernadette is not the most comfortable person behind the wheel. And pedestrians here are simply suicidal. No one died and we got there eventually. The choice was not easy, Bernadette wanted dark paint because of dirt but the cheapest was light paint because pigment is expensive. SO we eventually decided on Champagne, a less appropriate colour for this situation I cannot imagine. As we left, three guys who had approached us on the way in asked again on the way out if they could paint. They started at KW600,000 and ended at KW200,000 with us pushing them out of the car. Now while we were in the store B got a call from Ruth the radio reporter I had already spoken too who wanted to do a live broadcast from the compound, so we went by to pick her up and take her with us.
Between Bethany and I being interviewed live via cell phone and the gate makers reneging on their agreement to install the gate (I’ve never quiet understood the issue but anyway they simply got back in their van and left), no painting got done that morning. We left and I spent the afternoon trying to recuperate from the events since I left Boston. A group of us worked hard into the evening in order to get schedule documented for the rest of our time since we found that we had been over booking ourselves. Remember I am writing about me experience but we have 18 people going in 3 different directions at any one moment. The organization chart has been great ever since, I’m even taking pictures of its evolution.
We started off Wednesday by dropping of one contingent at the Kabulonga School, which is an elite school in the country and we had arranged for our youth to meet with their youth for an AIDS Peer Education discussion. This was in a whole different world than most of Lusaka we have seen so far.
My team went to start the painting in Garden. We tied to clean the walls but they didn’t have a brush so we used a roller pad I had brought. When we all proved about 18inches too short so Mary the project co-coordinator went to find a ladder – it came back – two long pieces of rotten wood with a few irregularly placed pieces or varying lengths for the rungs. Shinyengu took one look at the ladder and one at me and delicately suggested it might not be wise to use it. Later Bernadette arrived with a small aluminium ladder from her home and we were able to get the first coat of paint on the largest room. We even taught Mary to paint.
While waiting for our bus we ventured father a field into the compound. Friendly people, very friendly kids and total poverty everywhere. The kids are hilarious when they see a camera, when you start to take a photo of one you have 10 before the shutter closes, and 25 before the second shot is take. And they love to see their own image in the lcd viewer of our digital cameras. Justine and Georgette took me over to see the tavern and the bar they had been telling me about. As far as I can make out these two shacks are differentiated by the size of the “glass”. The bar has regular cups; the tavern drinkers appear to use a bucket. The other choice is the home brew being cared for by a flock of older kids. I was offered a hip size bottle of the warm stuff but refused.
In the afternoon we went back with a larger crew and when we got there they women had already started to fill the holes in the walls and clean the other rooms. I set my crew to work and was pulled away by B so I could buy some more provisions. She is doing this to prove to me that she is being economical with CWB money by buying at the best prices. She even took me by another metalworker to show me a gate the same as we had bought, but this one was twice as expensive. She even told the metal smith to hand over his book of records so that she could show me that he was selling one of Zambia’s ministers less money for gates than her. Bernadette is quite a force. By the time I got back the painters were finishing off for the day.
What can I say about the cats? We are living in two nice villas but sad to say our has has the problem of a couple of cats living in our attic. And as you know cats are nocturnal and we are not. This has caused a few problems with people who are scared of cats and even though I tried to convince them that they are Feral Dogs or an African Bush Opossum.
We still have a problem.
posted by Rodney | 4:58 PM
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