March 1, 2009

Mutende mukwai! (a Bemba greeting of health and peace)

Once again, the amount of time between updates is inexcusable, a fact for which I will more than likely have to apologize for at the beginning of every mass e-mail for the entirety of my Peace Corps service. Rather than launch into an extended apology, however, I will simply plunge straight into brief accounts of the many activities that have composed life here in Zambia for the past 5 months or so and that have, as a consequence, resulted in my recluse-like behavior.

To start, the work side of things has been more hectic and fulfilling than I ever expected. It seems like there's always some new project to start or idea to build on, and I feel incredibly fortunate to have been placed in a community that aims to take full advantage of having a Peace Corps volunteer working and living in their area. It is a not-uncommon Peace Corps experience to struggle in finding the kind of motivation and enthusiasm that matches their own within those they are working and living with in the village, but I, thankfully, have more often than not been blessed to work with some of the most determined groups and individuals that I have ever met.

Some highlights from the past few months include a 'VCT Field Day', which I organized in October. This basically involved inviting one of the health clinics in my area to set up 'Voluntary Counseling and Testing' (VCT) for a day so that people could receive HIV testing along with some HIV/AIDS sensitization in the form of presentations by locally-trained peer educators. Acknowledging the power of football (or 'soccer' for all of you people in the States), I invited each of the 8 villages I work with to form their own teams to play against one another throughout the day. All and all, it was a resounding success, with over 300 people attending and everyone hoping to repeat the program every 6 months or so, which will definitely encourage the idea of periodic, continuous testing as well.

Being a LIFE (Linking Income, Food, and the Environment) volunteer, the past months have also been some of the busiest of the year, seeing as Zambia's rain season runs from early November until late March. This is pretty much the most important time of the year for rural farmers (aka absolutely everyone I live with in the village) as they spend all day, every day, in their fields, working for the best yield they can possibly manage, which will, in turn, determine how much income they will generate for that year. The main crops here in the northern part of Zambia are maize, cassava, groundnuts (what we call peanuts), and beans, though many people grow plenty of other things like pumpkins, sweet potatoes, and garden vegetables, mostly for home consumption. With pretty much their standard of living based on the success of each year's harvest, nearly everyone works physically harder during this time than I've ever seen anyone work in my entire life. Let me just say that I will never look at farm machinery the same way again. Farmers here basically take wild African bush and turn it into hectares upon hectares of organized, cultivated land simply with large hoes in their (extremely callused) hands. A traditional technique for generating high yields here is called 'chitemene', which is a slash-and-burn system that is one of the main contributors to deforestation in Zambia and is brutal on the soil. Part of my job is to promote conservation farming techniques that preserve the soil and incorporate trees into the farming system, rather than destroying them. To this end, I organized and facilitated a workshop in November where I gathered members of the many farmers' and women's groups I work with to discuss in detail many of the things we'd been talking about informally for months, such as minimum tillage, seed spacing and storage, agroforestry, composting, and natural fertilizers and pesticides. Not only was it incredibly effective to have many of my counterparts in the same room sharing ideas, but this was sort of a culminating moment for me in terms of how far my language and extension skills have come since the beginning of my service. Following the workshop, I implemented a seed multiplication project with all the attending groups, the basic idea being to give a small amount of various seeds to farmers who will return double the amount they were given of each type after harvest. This increased supply will then be given out to other farmers for the next season, growing and growing each year. In short, these many months have included a lot of time talking agriculture and working out in the fields with my counterparts whenever the pretty fantastic rainstorms don't keep us stuck inside.

After following up with a lot of the Conservation Farming workshop participants, I decided that a similar type of interactive program focused on basic business skills would be beneficial to a lot of people in my area. It may be hard to wrap your head around, but illiteracy and a poor education system overall has resulted in most of the people I work with lacking skills in basic record-keeping of costs/sales, calculation of profit/loss, product-value addition (e.g. making and selling peanut butter instead of just raw peanuts), and long-term planning. Seeing as I'm aiming to start small-scale income-generating activities with a lot of these groups and individuals, these skills are key if the projects are to be successful and sustainable. In any event, another workshop was organized in January and was equally successful, laying a strong foundation for IGAs we hope to work on in the future.

My biggest undertaking above all for the last 5 months, however, has been getting the Maloba Community School up and running. Due to the overwhelming and simply amazing support we received from so many of you in the States, we raised double the amount of funds we were aiming to raise, totaling approximately 40 million Zambian kwatcha (around $8,000). This basically means that we now have the opportunity to build a community school of a standard that will almost guarantee further investment and development from the government in the future. In other words, the sustainability of the project has greatly increased due to the additional funds, a fact that we are all so ecstatic about. Instead of going into many of the details of how the project is going so far here, I've attached a thank you letter I wrote to any and everyone who supported the project in one way or another, so please read it if you get the chance.

Aside from all that, I truly cannot believe that it's now been a little over a year since I left what was once my only definition of home and found an extended one here. This also means that it's now been over a year since I've seen many of you, which simultaneously saddens me and reassures me that, if the last year is any standard by which to measure time, I will once again be seeing many of you before I know it. This past year has brought more emotional ups and downs than I thought humanely possible, but I can say without reservation that it has been one of the most memorable and formidable years of my life. Zambia has truly felt like a home away from home when I needed it most, including through the death of both of my truly heroic grandfathers since I left home. Fellow Peace Corps volunteers and the friends and family I have made at the village level have been such a source of strength and inspiration throughout my experience, for which I am eternally grateful.

I'll end with my routine plea that you continue to send e-mails and letters, which are all read and re-read with appreciation and affection. Any updates are extremely appreciated as I spend many very quiet nights in Maloba Village filing through fond memories and simply wondering what everyone back home is up to and how they are doing. Hoping you are all happy, healthy, and loving life... Love and miss you all madly.

Tukesamonana (We'll be seeing each other),
Sara