demonstracion del gongo

Preface:

Yes, I’ve been delinquent. Thanks to those of you sending emails to check in, see how things are going, and make sure that I’m actually still in Zambia and not back in Canada hiding out somewhere in Kits eating bon bons and drinking organic fair-trade non-fat cappuccinos extra hot while getting a reflexology treatment and green tea facial.

I am in fact, still here, still alive, and doing more than well. There is a lot to update on in terms of my project now with PROFIT and Zambia National Farmers Union as things are falling into place, but I’ve been selfish in keeping personal experiences on this side of the Atlantic and thought that I would devote a bit of webspace to being me in Zambia.

So, if you’re looking for deep development insights, check back in a few days. Otherwise, if you' re just looking for some story telling to distract you from your work, fix yourself a cup of coffee, pour yourself a glass of chardonnay (one or the other...would not suggest both) and read on. Sorry if it is a bit text heavy, but there are some pictographs scattered throughout to satisfy you visual types.

All the best you as spring arrives throughout the land of the maple leaf!

Randomness. Entropy. No, I’m not talking about the second law of thermodynamics, I’m talking about good old fashioned, random, *surprise*, 'what-the!' kind of events that shake you around, leave ou laughing and remind you that you are alive.

One of the parts of Ghana that I loved was the energy that seemed to swirl around you. Things were systematically chaotic, orderly enough to save pedestrians from being annihilated by a manic taxis, to keep goats steady on the top of buses traveling 100km/hour, to let you fall head over feet into gutters the size of roads and still be ok, to make a 4 hour bus ride stretch into 8 hours and give you a gorgeous moon to stare at. This chaos was so perfectly choreographed it left you wondering if there was a master puppeteer out there and hoping that he or she could pay us a visit in Canada to inject some energy and excitement into our well planned, orderly and dare I say it, predictable lives.

I have to be honest. When I arrived in Lusaka, I was impressed and excited by many things, but I was also longing for chaos as things here are a lot more western here in style and order. Gutters are covered so you couldn’t fall into them even if you tried or paid someone to help you;i have yet to see goats surfing on the top of buses, cars generally stay within the speed limits and usually stop at the red lights, the phones usually work; you usually have water and electricity is relatively stable. So naively, after my first month, I let my guard down and thought to myself ‘wow, everything seems to happen here as planned.’

Record screeches to a stop. Fork clinks against the plate. Awkward silence fills the air.

Thankfully, a series of events that happened a few weekends ago reminded me, that if fact, the chaos exists, the randomness is here, and that I should rid my mind of that silly notion as the powers are alive and well.

Every quarter, EWB volunteers will get together over a long weekend to update our training, go over our respective projects and share ideas with each other and catch each other up on our placements. The first one for me was over the Easter long weekend and I was excited to be heading over to the neighbouring country Malawi.

The BIG PLAN was fairly straight forward. Take the 0600 hours bus from Lusaka to Chipatat and arrive in the eastern border town of by 1400hours. Next, make a quick dash over the boarder into Malawi, hire a taxi ride over to Mchinji ( yes, that same town made famous by Madonna), hire another taxi or bus over Lilongwe where we would meet up with other EWB volunteers. Together, we would all take a bus to Senga Bay on Lake Malawi by 1900 hours.

Easy peasy, connect the dots, 1-2-3-and we’re done.

But consistent with the realities of development, and to feed the Jeffery Sachs vs. William Easterly showdown, we quickly learned that the realy challenge isn’t in making good top down BIG PLAN, the real challenge lies in implementation and being able to SEARCH FOR SOLUTIONS when things stray from the BIG PLAN.

Here’s how it all went down:

0530hrs: The six of us arrive happy at the Intercity bus station and begin to settle in for our long journey to Chipata. I had remembered the randomness of buses in Ghana (read: it gets there when it gets there, if it gets there) but was reassured by my friend Paul that

"no, no, the buses here in Zambia are MUCH more reliable, comfortable, leave on time"

and it was going to be smooth sailing.

0600hrs: Departure time passes, bus is still in the station but no worries, we roll out of the station 20 minutes later and after a small detour to the filling station we were soon on our way, accompanying the sun rise over the country side.

0710hrs: A small announcement wakes me from my slumber. ‘Someone’ had not tightened the cap properly and hydraulic fluid had leaked out. Ah, acuna muthatha, no worries, all they had to do was get some replacement fluid and then tighten the cap and we would all be on our way. We pullover to the roadside in Chongwe, 40 km out of town.

Sometime past noon. Miracle of miracles. It turns out refilling the hydraulic fluid and tightening the cap is an intensive 5+ hour process becauseamazingly we were still in Chongwe, still the same 40 km outside of Lusaka and no further along on our journey. I could have walked and gotten further.

So, what is there to do when stranded on the side of the road and there's no CAA to call or Tim Horton's to visit?

Plenty.

For one, we chatted with the locals.

Fellow volunteer Jen with candy man who entertained stranded travellers with sweets

Checked out local latrine building techniques and conditions (hold your nose)

Played some ultimate Frisbee and watched as our bus drives off, in the opposite direction of where you want to go…with all of your things still on it... including two of your friends.

uhmmmm what's wrong with this picture?

We even played Iron chef and launched Zambia’s first ever Banana Fritter.

Big pile-o-greasy fritters (the original)

A fritters is a fried dough that is one of the few street foods here. We made friends with seller and learned that in the course of one day, she can net about 100, 000 ZMK ($30) selling them. I remembered how my mom makes fried bananas and suggested to her that perhaps she try adding a little someth'n someth'n in the way of bananas to differentiate herself from her competitors. Naturally, Madame was a bit hesitant and doubtful at first. but fear not, Jen and I used a market facilitation approach; we helped buy down her risk by investing in test bananas ourselves and then guaranteed her a market (us).

Madame testing out new fritters with our investment of bananas

We're not sure if she did this out of pity for our boredom, but she gave it a go, and while it probably requires a dash of sugar and a touch of salt, we would have to say, pretty successful!

Cooking of the first ever banana fritter in zambia!

And then as we were digesting the grease of the friteer, we waited.

And we waited some more.

And, after a few of the market ladies overheard us wishing for an impassa (reed mat), they generously brought one from their house. We laid down for a nice nap, sheltered from the sun, right beside the tar road and a maize field. Ah, such is the life

ant-eye view as we nap beside a field of maize (whichclearly hadn't had fertliser applied to it.)

And then, the moment we fell asleep, a replacement bus pulls up ( problem solved).

7 hours later, we arrived in Chipata without another hitch. Got some food, and then made our way over the next leg of the trip – crossing the border

Borders, for whatever reason scare me. Even when I’m passing into the US ( which of course, is scary in its own right) I get nervous. It’s not like I’m a fugitive, or have things I’m not suppose to have, hiding somewhere they’re not supposed hide. But even though I’m entirely innocent, I still get nervous.

So you can imagine my feeling that night, trying to cross from Zambia to Malawi with an expired visa (longer story). The border guard didn’t seem too impressed by small detail but thankfully I had gotten malaria the week before and even more thankfully, had my medical clinic receipt on me and this seemed to be a good enough for the guard. Problem solved, and I was waved through after only small confrontation.

Border behind us, we moved on and looked for a taxi to take us to Mjinchi. We found one about the size of a Honda civic and 6 of us + driver (= 7) piled our bags and bodies into a car in a manner that resembled those car commercials touting lots of interior space: two guys in the front passenger, four of us in the back. If life was really like what it looks like on TV, it would have been relatively uneventful and boring, but fortunately, that’s not the case and we were enjoyed a more colourful version.

Paul and Ed, two of the biggest and tallest volunteers among us, crammed into passenger seat

First, let me set the context, it’s not like any of us are heavy or ‘big boned’ ( KK, don’t even go there), but when you add 7 people into a 5 seater which already was lowered, pack the trunk full of bags, take away any elasticity in the shocks, and drive it over unpaved roads so bumpy it makes a mogul run look like a sheet of glass, you get an up and down ride that goes something like this :

UP.

Down.

Ssccccrrreeeeeccchhh, cccrrruuuunnnchhhhhh, ggrrriiinnnndddd

Cringe

UP.

Down.

(oh here we go again, cringe)

Ssccccrrreeeeeccchhh, cccrrruuuunnnchhhhhh.

Cringe.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat for another 10 minutes with intermittent pauses as we dragged our way up to drinking bars ask if there is petrol for sale. (This is not because cars run on Redbull and vodka here, it’s because this is how fuel works in Malawi).

Amazingly, we didn’t leave a single piece of the exhaust system behind us.

After the off roading stint, we found some nice tar road and of course, nice tar roads come with road blocks. We rolled up to the first one and the policeman walked up to the window and saw our taxi driver looking back at him. The black face was familiar to him and he was about to let us through until the light of his flashlight caught sight of 6 shiny muzungus piled ontop of each other with our glowing innocent faces peering back out at him. ‘ Uhhhhhhhhhh….Hi officer”

“AHHHHH!!” he yelped. He looked as though he had seen a ghost and I thought he was going to pass out from shock. He didn’t.

In fact, I think he was probably more scared than anything else because he waved us through without hesitation.

We rolled into Mjinchi around 2100 hours with another 300 + km of traveling ahead of us. Our taxi wasn’t going to take us any further and we had to negotiate for another. A few emerged from the shadows but the prices were looking to be quite high and we were prepared to settle in for a good bartering session. We didn’t have to wait too long though as we got a great deal from one man who was very eager to drive us. So eager he began to wave around the bottle of beer he was drinking.

Uh Ahn. Safety first. We informed him that he had successfully disqualified himself but he insisted that he would find one of his drivers who would be able to drive us. Three minutes later, he cruises up alongside us and informs us that he can’t find his driver, but he has an idea: why doesn’t one of US drive because by the time we arrive at our destination, he’ll probably have sobered up and can take his car back.

Brilliant. And in that instant, Paul become our taxi driver, we acquired a new passenger, played a bit of musical chairs and packed ourselves into the car. Problem solved and we moved onward.

Things went relatively smoothly after that. We passed through check points mostly un-accosted and after 18 hours of traveling and were finally starting to ‘win’ as my friend Mike once put it when writing about the way things work in Africa. We were reveling about things were going so well and dreaming about how we would soon be able to take a nice long sleep and then….

POW!

We blew a tire.

1 km from our destination.

Incroyable!

They say that most discoveries happen by accident and I’d have to attest to that. In blowing a tire, we discovered a new breathalyzer test; screw walking in a straight line, forget touching your nose with your fingers, throw away that fancy machine officer, just get someone to change a tire.

Over the hour and half ride from Lilongwe, the driver had gathered his senses and passed with flying colours. In three minutes flat (seriously, no exaggeration) to all of our astonishment, the spare was secured and the car repacked. Problem solved we were ready to go.

We re-packed ourselves back into the car, sat in silence, held our breath and kept our eyes peeled for ready for anything, ANYTHING to happen in the last 1000m. I half expected the ground to open up and swallow us whole, or a tree to emerge from the barren roadside and crash across the road, or seven dwarfs to wander in front of the car and chain themselves to the road, or even a pterodactyl to swoop in and pluck our little car from the crust of the earth.

Amazingly, nothing did.

We finally arrived at our destination, 1am the next morning, full 6 hours later than planned and 19 hours since we started off. We lived through the escapade, a bit tired, unscarred and two lessons richer. The first lesson being that one that most development agencies still don’t fully grasp – a good plan is worth crap if you can’t implement it and in implementing, it’s all about searching for solutions.

And then, the second, perhaps most important lesson we learned was about holds the balance of power here.

And it sure ain't us.

OFFICIAL EWB Southern Africa Volunteers in Senga Bay, Malawi

True colours