RAINY SEASON

Neighbors and friends - the street vendors

The skin on my finger tips exhibit tight, scrunched up lines, like crinkled potato chips, an outcome of all this rain. Webs are starting to develop in the skin between my fingers and toes. Several days of straight rain, not the soft, London sprinkles, but the hard, jovial – sometimes angry – type that sounds like people are dancing on the metal roof top in black, Mary Jane’s. When this kind arrives at night on the tails of silent lightening rods that approach the valley, like sneaky, field mice at dusk, light up the bluish grey skies, I remain sheltered in my room. I love these moments in Chipata, the noisy clattering of rain drops intermingled with the earthy smell of after-birth, which sets the mood for contemplations or a quiet evening reading. 
 

One motel guest complained about all the rain, which leaves large brown puddles of mud along the sides of roads. He explained that several days of rain, one day rhythmically ensconcing into another day, is unusual for Chipata, even for rainy season. If my calculations are correct, I believe there have only been three sunny days in the last three weeks.

On the bright side, all this water is good for the dams and for the maize, which surely love it, judging from the rate at which they’re growing. One large patch of maize on Lundazi Road grew three-fold over three weeks. Ndelema (mushrooms) have also popped up from out of the ground – miracle mushrooms I call them because of their size. White and tender in texture, like Japanese shiitakes, they fetch a mean price on the market – ZMK10,000 for a bundle. I was told they can be gathered from deep in the forest, where the soils smell dank and where the earthen worms like to feast on plant decay. When I expressed the desire to gather them myself – even commemorating the event by purchasing a shiny, green basket – I was warned about the snakes that lie in waiting for mushroom predators, waiting to strike. Apparently, the snakes like them, as well. Truth or lore?

On the 10^th of January, I am happy to report that the HIV/AIDS testing was successfully done at Magazine Squatter Compound. My gratitude is extended to Baby and the Corridors of Hope III people for following through. I hope to make it a regular cycle in the upcoming years by writing to USAID for funding the training of more outreach testers and for the portable HIV/AIDS kits. Diane Sawyer reported that conducting HIV/AIDS testing is cumbersome for many rural areas because blood does not keep for hours and the blood samples have to be ridden in on horseback into the nearest testing site. With these portable tests, they are done on site and are completed in about 20 minutes. 

Unfortunately, the family planning workshop I also scheduled the day before with the Society of Family Health and Family Planning was a no-show without a word of warning. This outcome, unfortunately, has been consistent in my efforts to work with the public. And, often times, there is no written or verbal feedback from the social planners, who normally do this type of outreach work, about scheduling and planning. As such, I had to coordinate these programs myself. I waited at the Hope Campus Basic School, but no one from the SFHFP showed up. After an hour, I gave up and headed back to the office.

There have been other progress this month, albeit slowly, in relation to my placement at the Council. I managed to get a meeting with the Director of Planning to discuss the contents of the Integrated Development Plan, which will surely result in productive revisions to the document. As far as a response from the deputy directors, there have been none as of yet, but I continue to follow up with them. I anticipate this meeting on Wednesday with the Director, however, will be productive and help to move the Council one more step closer to acquiring an IDP for Chipata District.

Sleepy, lazy snail

Chipata has many different wildlife and not all languish at the South Luangwa Park in Mfue. In the Old Civic Center building, where I work, snails come out in droves. The rain seems to coax them out of their hiding places, wherever those nooks and crannies are. They sit on the underside of the leaves of flora plants, sometimes unfurling themselves out of their conch shells to glide from one branch to another. I found a green clump on a plant stalk on this day, when I decided to observe their movements, and realized it was snail dung. After observing one sleepy snail, I realized that they release dung from the middle of their soft undersides, through a tiny hole that’s barely visible to the naked eye. 

On this same day, a small group of Ngoni people made their way to the parking lot to the right of Barclays Bank. A passerby told me they were performing a dance normally performed at the N’cwala Ceremony, which takes place for three days beginning on the 28^th of February. I will just miss them again this year, as I did last year. But, on this day, I was treated to their dance. I video taped them on a digital camera; I can’t upload it to this blog, but will eventually post all the videos on my Facebook page as soon as I learn how to do it. In the meantime, readers will have to settle for just the photos. 

Child dancer - N'cwala Dance

Female dancer

Ngoni Warriors

Fundraising reminder – please keep in mind that volunteering anywhere is rewarding, but doing so in the Global South is an experience irreplaceable by any other experience, despite the undulating emotions that are normally attached to living in another country. Please send in your donation to help me meet my goal of US$2,000. I realize that some of you have opted to send your donation by check, so that will not show on the list of contributors on the My Fundraising Page. If you haven’t received your receipt, please contact Tara Henderson, whose contact information is found on the CUSO-VSO site (please see link on this page). You may also contribute with a credit card, which can be done easily and safely through the My Fundraising link. Again, as always, zikomo to those who have already done so.   

A New Year and a Fresh Start

Welcoming in 2012           

           The morning breeze snaking its way in through the open windows of my room beckoned to me, coaxing me out of sleep. The clock on my cell phone read 8h29, a late start compared to my usual waking routine of 7h00. Today felt different to me, not in the way I unfolded my form from my bed, but in my senses.

            Breakfast was the same - English – consisting of two fried eggs, a sausage link, and canned, baked beans. I brought with me the dark, Frisco coffee because the brand the motel serves isn’t quite strong enough to suit my palate. I lingered over breakfast, reading A Thousand Splendid Suns, a novel about life in Afghanistan, written by Khaled Hosseini, the same author who penned The Kite Runner. Over Christmas weekend, I had borrowed other books from Alan’s and Frances’s collection, from whom many volunteers in and around Chipata also borrow. Reading gives us something to do on many slow days. I have to return the others that I have already completed.

            When Judith, the cleaning lady, greeted me with a jovial, “happy new year”, I realized that today was the birth of 2012, a future I had been anticipating since the beginning of December. I greeted her back before discussing the minor detail of cleaning my bathroom. I like to help her with the cleaning because it gives me something to do and pleasantly passes the hours away. Sweeping, wiping my work desk, washing my dishes, and doing the laundry . . . weekends are usually uneventful, lazy days, perfect for tending to my chores. I usually hand wash my clothing every other weekend. I’ve devised a way to soak them overnight in my water tub and then rub them clean after breakfast the following morning. I do this to protect my fingers from being rubbed raw and so I don’t have to work my arm muscles so hard. The best part is dumping out the brown water, knowing that the red sandy dust and grime have loosened from the fiber of my clothing. Seeing the brown water go down the drain makes me feel like I’ve cleaned out the clutter from my life and victorious, knowing that I’ve tackled and won the battle with the dirt embedded in my clothes.

            Since the start of the rainy season, laundry has become something of a guessing game. I’ve had to start reading the skies for signs of rain showers. Today, dark stains marked the bottom of the clouds, which signify that rain is hovering, ominously, waiting expectantly for the brush with the right temperatures to dissolve the mingling of hydrogen and oxygen gases, which patiently keep the rains at bay. The handy man said that it will start at 12h00 today, so I keep my watchful eye on the sky, ready to bolt out the door to retrieve my drying laundry at the first drop of rain. 

           In comparison to this season, summer was great for hanging clothes. The savannah heat meant that I could work outside in temperatures that would dry my clothes in a mere hour, and on most days, on the hottest of days, in even less time. Dragon flies and grasshoppers keep me company as I bent and hung each item on the line. I loved the predictability of it.

            Nowadays, the unpredictability of rainy season puts me a little on edge as I never know when the sky will open. Sometimes, the cool breeze preceding the rainfall is the only clue. Today, the humidity that keeps licking at my face, my forearms, and neck mislead me into believing that my laundry will be safe. I still don’t know.

            Christmas came and went for me this year. There wasn’t the usual anticipation of a hearty meal that I had the last two years as Christmas approached, although I did have the option of joining other volunteers to celebrate the holidays with a Christmas lunch. One of the volunteers from Katete, Lynie, who is temporarily staying at Michelle’s house, cooked up a huge meal. I learned later that she made various Filipino dishes; their celebration was attended by other volunteers in town and the vicinity. I ate cream lasagna at Protea Hotel, instead. That’s my plan again today – to treat myself to an expensive lunch with, of course, sweet red wine, and then come home and allow my body to absorb the delectable fatty cheese and cream.

            Two Friday’s ago, I finally finished the rough draft of the integrated development plan. This past week I spent hours polishing it, going home early on some days to circumvent the distraction at the office, and stay on schedule. Today will be the day of completion before submitting it on Tuesday to the powers that be. I am thinking about trying to do the comprehensive planning training in January. My effort to conduct it last month was politely deflected purely by the Council’s ignoring my requests for a lunch budget. I think that once the planners go through the training, they’ll start to piece together the different elements of urban life and see the value of integrating tasks, such as business development trainings, to those wanting to start a business here and planning for economic clusters and corridors. In the training manual, I’ve also included guidelines for planning ecologically, which I have observed isn’t really done carefully in Chipata. One planner explained that urban forestry isn’t incorporated into the normative process of parceling land, selling, and developing. There seems to be reluctance, too, from the planning leadership to shift the planning guidelines towards an integrated plan. In fact, this IDP is one of the reasons, if not the reason, planners were brought here in the first place. Although everything happens more slowly in Chipata, I’m starting to think that there is the conventional manner of avoidance accepted and tolerated by locals and I wonder how much of it has to do with other social complexities that Zambians are privy to, but I’m not. I plan to do a departure presentation and leave the next volunteer with a description of goals accomplished and areas where planning may continue to progress in Chipata. The presentation, I hope, will allow the Council planners to see the value of building on work that has already been done and the value of seeing how important concepts, such as inclusiveness and integration, are to improving planning in Chipata District.  

          One of the jobs I'm quite proud of is the completion of the monitoring of the water kiosks in Magazine squatter compound, where I have been planning and attempting to map with GPS coordinates for the last few weeks. Hopefully, the town clerk and I can agree to do land valuing there and give legal title to the residents.

16h00 Same Day

          I just returned from a two hour hike up the same mountain on which I usually trek on days I need to think. The air was nice today - after bouts with grey clouds, the day gave way to a beautiful sunny later afternoon. Next time, I'll upload photographs of the view from the top. In the meantime, I thought I would add some of the views and faces of Chipata.

Children of Magazine Squatter Compound

Kalongwezi Neighborhood facing the gorgeous Chipata mountains

Itinerant food trader

Another view of Chipata Mountains in Kalongwezi extension

My colleague, Namakau Maambo, one of the social planners, extraordinaire!

Another fundraising appeal

        Just a reminder to you reading my blog pages - I am still fundraising for my placement. I believe I am closer to my goal of US$2,000, so if you haven’t done so yet, please contribute today with US$10.00 or more either through the mail or through the “My Fundraising” page link to the right of my blog. Your contribution allows CUSO International to keep sending volunteers overseas to support capacities in needy countries.