Storms in Africa

For the past week we in Serenje district have experienced a strange anomaly: rain and cold weather in October. This is strange for two reasons: for one thing, when it rains in Zambia, it RAINS. We're talking torrential downpours, skies darkening and grumbling for hours if not days in advance, clouds billowing and lightening bolts flashing, rain so thick you could take a shower in it, the type of rain that brings a complete transformation of the landscape, leaves the ground itself in a different shape from how it found it. A teacher in my village the other day complained about this "London weather," which was completely and bizarrely accurate; the weather has been cold and damp, muggy and drizzly, like a petulant rainstorm that can't decide whether it wants to precipitate or not. The other day it drizzled. Drizzled. In Zambia. Weird.

The other, more obvious reason this week's rainy-cold weather has been so strange is this: October is the peak of Zambia's hot-dry season. Let me say that again: we have been having rainy cold weather this week, in the peak month of our hot dry season. Sooooo, something is clearly wrong here. I mean, two weeks ago I was visiting a farmer to help him plant a tree nursery, and when I went to stand up from planting some seeds I found that I had to sit down again, the heat and sun had made me too dizzy to stand properly. Now don't worry, Mom, I've been drinking plenty of fluids and carrying extra water when I go biking (and trying to avoid biking in the middle of the day, but this is harder than you might think, assuming you plan to go anywhere at all), but nonetheless during last year's hot-dry season and this past September I have been surprised at how easily I get dehydrated, especially since I don't usually require that much water to begin with.

Yet this past week none of this has been a problem; instead, I have been forcibly reminded of the cold-dry season of May-July, when the sky stays cloudy and gray as though it's going to rain (or as if it's mourning the end of the rainy season, as it never actually does rain), when the women wear blankets around their midsections as if they were citenges and the babies are all dressed in the best knit woolens their mothers can find. Where a week ago I was hiding from the heat in my hut, sweating night and day, this past week I had to drag back out the winter blankets and fleece jacket, freshly laundered and put into temporary storage on a shelf, and now I huddle around fires and under blankets. Cleary the world is confused about what month it is.

The difference between this past week and the actual cold-dry season is that the weather this week has not actually been dry. It has been humid, thundrous, and occasionally drizzly. I have woken up each morning to a yard of wet sand, and each evening find watering my garden and tree nursery largely unnecessary, as the clouds have not cleared long enough for last night's shower to sun-dry away. Each afternoon this week I have had conversations with the strong African thunder, my side boiling down to such statements as "I hear ya, I hear ya" and "oh shut up." Yesterday I faced a dilemma I was not expecting to experience for another month: the old "is it raining where the meeting is being held, and thus should I bother going?" question. If it is raining, no one will show up, which means there's no sense in my going and getting drenched for nothing. However, depending on the size and direction of the storm, it may be raining where I am and not where the meeting is taking place, in which case I should ride through and away from the rain to reach my meeting. That is not, you understand, a question I would usually expect myself to need to answer during the dry season. Yet here we are.

This early rain could, potentially, have more serious of an impact beyond simply freaking out the muzungus. Traditionally the early rains start in November and become well-established in December, eventually tapering off in early April. Farmers, then, are advised to start planting their fields in late November/early December, and some plant even later than that (because they don't start digging until the rain loosens the soil, and digging with hoes takes a looooong time). So if these early rains are a premature start to the rainy season, that means many Zambian farmers are already a month behind. If the rains start early, they could also end early, and that could mean a crop-killing drought in March or even February. On the other hand, if the farmers attempt to plant their crops early and this turns out to be just a temporary fluke in the weather patterns, their crops won't make it to January. It is too risky to change the planting schedule and therefore much smarter to keep to the regular planting schedule. So essentially we have no choice but to keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best.

All this is a long-winded way of saying: global warming is bad. Whether it's a massive cataclysmic event like the tsunami that hit japan or tornadoes and floods sweeping America or a subtle but noticeable and potentially harmful change in the weather, like the more-massive-than-usual amount of snowfall faced by New England last winter (followed by an unusually intense heatwave) or this early rain that could, potentially (and I don't mean to be an alarmist) be a sign of a drought, the bottom line is that our climate is changing, and at a more rapid pace than usual. We see signs of it every day. And while we can escape the cold fronts and heat waves with air conditioning and heaters, the developing world-- who rely on the current weather patterns to survive, whose daily actions are determined by the weather (no, really, they do not leave the house during rainstorms, ever), who have shaped their lives, their clothing and shelter, their sources and methods of obtaining food around the weather-- may not be so lucky.

Today dawned bright and sunny, still cold and crisp but holding the promise of a sky willing to hold its bounty off a little longer. Let's hope, for the sake of these people who have taken me in, fed me and shared with me what little they have, taught me and cared for me and encouraged me and loved me, that there are nothing but clear skies ahead.

A good week for alternative energy

People, both Zambians and Americans, often ask me what I do in the village, and it's a difficult question to answer. Not just because what I do, primarily, is LIVE in the village, which means the list of things I "do" in the village is very long and prominently features such incredible accomplishments as sleeping, reading, and cooking on an open fire, but also because my program within Peace Corps, aptly named the LIFE program, is multi-faceted and immensely broad. LIFE is an acronym for Linking Income, Food, and Environment, which is an umbrella that covers all topics from income generation to environmental education, from food security to reforestation, from organic farming to nutrition education, from beekeeping to tree nurseries to energy efficiency to animal husbandry and so on.

On top of this, the Peace Corps Volunteer experience itself is very broad and open-ended. Volunteers essentially write their own programs, tailor-made to suit the needs and interests of the village and the interests and abilities of the volunteer. So it is easy for a LIFE volunteer to branch out from the already-broad guidelines of their program and work in programs like fish farming, sanitation and health education, youth development, womens' empowerment, schoolteaching, etc. And, of course, when you work in Africa, just about every development program, directly or indirectly, relates back to the epidemic of HIV/AIDS.

But at its heart the LIFE program is about improved forestry practices. Zambia currently boasts one of the highest deforestation rates of all the countries in the world. The LIFE program was originally begun in conjunction with and to support Zambia's forestry department in reforestation and environmental preservation. We build fruit tree nurseries and woodlots for food and timber, teach farmers to plant nitrogen-fixing trees in their fields (agroforestry), discourage the slash-and-burn technique called chitimene and encourage "early burning" (burning in May-June before the tree seeds begin to germinate), teach in schools about the importance of forests and ecosystems, teach farmers to keep bees so they will have a vested interest in flowering trees to increase honey production, and explore alternative fuel sources to reduce the rate of deforestation caused by firewood-harvesting and charcoal-burning.

Encouraging forest conservation through the promotion of alternative fuel sources is a topic I find greatly interesting because it relates to the field of "appropriate technology"-- the idea that people at the local level should be able to use local materials and their own skills and creativity to find inventive ways to improve their own lives, rather than sitting around waiting for aid agencies to come drop expensive machines and solutions in their laps. Of course appropriate technology is not applicable to every circumstance-- certainly there are situations where people are sick or hungry and simply need to be helped as quickly as possible-- but they are also a plethora of situations where the best way to help a group of people is to empower them to take control of their own lives and solve problems themselves. This concept has led to the invention of products such as locally-built handwashing stations, maize shellers, honey presses, and ways to preserve food through drying, smoking, and refrigeration. It has also led to the invention of two popular methods of using fuel without chopping down trees: corn cob charcoal and the fuel-efficient stove. These two inventions tie into my program-- the reforestation and environmental sustainability part-- perfectly, and they're a lot of fun.

A fuel-efficient stove runs on the idea that a cooking fire in a tightly-enclosed, insulated space (as opposed to an open fire) creates a concentrated supply of heat, allowing a person to cook using only deadwood found around the yard. This not only saves trees but also significantly reduces time and labor spent searching for firewood-- an especially large problem for women and young ladies who should be in school. The stove is built from a brick-clay-mud-sand-ash-straw mixture (the proportions and ingredients vary based on what's available), leaving a hollow area inside for the fire and a hole in the top and one side for wind flow. After it's built you must wait 2 weeks for the mud to dry before you can use it for cooking; the fire and heat exits the top hole and heats the pot that you place over said hole.

I built my first stove-- my own-- one year ago, about 3 months after I was posted at site. I built it on a platform so that I could stand while cooking, and I was really happy with the way it turned out. I built two more stoves with two different women in October, and then in January I built a stove with a women's group. Then this past Saturday I built a large two-burner stove on a raised platform with two young teachers in my age group. It was wonderful to work with someone who showed genuine interest in the work I was doing. They were very excited by the idea of having a stove to cook on. The building process took the entire day-- the platform took most of the morning, but the stove itself only took a little over an hour to make. Carrying soil and water and mixing the mortar took a large portion of our time and energy. We had to carry water in large buckets from a river nearby, carry bricks one by one, shovel sand into bags and carry it to the building site on my bicycle, and then use shovels and hoes to mix the ingredients as thoroughly as possible, or until our arms began to hurt from the weight of the water-logged soil, whatever came first. By the time we finished we were exhausted and sweating under the weight of mud and dust, and I had dirt all over my clothes, face, and arms, but it was the type of exhaustion that comes from a long day's work, so it didn't bother me. I took pictures and exchanged hugs and smiled all the way home. It was a good day.

As a general rule it is wise to only initiate programs in your village if there is interest amongst your villagers; otherwise you are likely to be working alone. However, when I first read about corn cob charcoal in a training manual I was so enamored by the idea that I ran to one of my counterparts, Mr. Chola, and began talking so excitedly about the topic that he was inspired by my enthusiasm to try and make some with me, though he no doubt thought his volunteer had gone insane. It was very nice of him to humor me.

Corn cob charcoal is usually made by cutting a hole in an oil drum, filling the drum with corn cobs, lighting a fire underneath the drum, and then, once the cobs are lit, sealing the drum tightly closed with soil to start the carbonization process. My counterpart, however, was only willing to indulge my insanity to a certain point; while he's not an avid drinker himself, people in my village are very fond of the cultural practice of brewing beer and wine in oil drums, and cutting a hole in the very expensive drum to light a fire underneath struck him as ridiculous. So I agreed to try it his way, or the Zambian way: arrange the cobs in a large mound, surround the cobs with thick, fibrous soil and grass, light the cobs and burn them a little, then cover them with fibrous lumps of soil to make a large soil kiln that traps the oxygen inside and allows the cobs to carbonize. This is how charcoal from trees is made in Zambia, and Mr. Chola saw no reason why it wouldn't work with corn cobs as well. So we tried it, and I was shocked to find that it worked quite effectively: within 30 hours we had a large pile of cob-shaped charcoal.

All this took place one year ago, and then the maize-harvesting season ended and the supply of cobs fell, so we decided to wait until the next harvest season to start sharing the idea with others. Which leads us to this past Friday, when we called a workshop to show people our idea of an easy, cheap, environmentally friendly(er) source of fuel-- one that would not only save trees and money and labor but would also amend the soil (the carbonization process makes the soil fertile) and reduce the amount of harmful woodsmoke people are breathing, thereby improving the village's overall health. It sounded like a win-win situation, but unfortunately attendance at the workshop was frustratingly low-- of the dozen people in attendance, 7 were family members who already lived on the compound with me and were only present because I was holding the workshop in their front yard. Still, while this sort of low turnout is discouraging, it is also quite common. And as my mother keeps telling me, making a difference in just one person's life is more than enough.

So I took a deep breath and held the workshop anyway-- we built a mound of soil, lit it, and sealed it so the cobs would carbonize. Then we took charcoal cobs from another pile we had prepared the week before and began the second part of the charcoal-making process: turning the cobs into charcoal briquettes. This is done so the charcoal will last longer-- cobs on their own burn very fast. What you do is pound the charcoal into small pieces, then mix it with a glue made by soaking cassava flour in hot water and then straining it. This creates a sort of black paste, which you then pack into tin cans with the bottoms missing and pound down with a hammer. This creates strong, tightly compressed briquettes which, after they dry for a couple of days, will burn about as long as regular wood charcoal. Everyone at the workshop got the chance to make a briquette, and then we got to burn some dry ones (we boiled some water, which I used to wash up later).

So to sum up: you get to dig up a lot of earth and then light a pile of corn cobs on FIRE and then ATTACK the dirtkiln with hoes to get the charcoal out and then POUND the charcoal and get your hands all dirty mixing it and then HAMMER it into little briquettes for drying. Seriously, who wouldn't want to do this all day every day? My guests ultimately agreed that the entire process is a lot of fun. I'm tempted to say getting my hands covered in gross black stuff was the highlight of the experience for me. I personally can't fathom why I didn't have hundreds of people at my workshop; CLEARLY this is the coolest thing ever, right? They must not have fully understood the awesomeness of the process.

And that's my week of adventures in alternative energy sources. Who knew saving trees could be so much fun? When I biked to Serenje on Sunday I was 3 times dirtier than normal-- as I showered I found dust and bits in my hair (my hair is like velcro, so I wasn't surprised). But it's fun to get your hands (and chitenge) dirty-- that's why I'm here in Peace Corps, to spend time with nature, and if I can help nature in the process, well that's just a bonus.

Happy 3rd of July!

In Zambia,
independence day falls on a hot day in late October, and a random July date in
the middle of Zambia's southern-hemispheric winter doesn't have much meaning or
significance here, so I think the Zambian people can be excused for
accidentally celebrating America's independence on the wrong day. And to be
more fair, it wasn't even America's independence we were celebrating-- it was a
festival for Zambian commercial farmers, complete with booths and tractors and
cricket games, but there were burgers and fries and cotton candy and fireworks,
so in the name of self-centered American patriotism we Peace Corps Volunteers
just assumed the party was for us and our home across the sea. So happy 3rd of July, everyone! I guess Zambia
was so excited about America's independence, they just had to celebrate a day early-- understandable.

The fireworks were
not the most incredible I've ever seen, but they were certainly the most
exciting: several of them went sideways instead of up, and we were very lucky
the field didn't catch fire. We all had to stay alert, just in case. It was a
chilly night-- like I said, it's winter here in July, not frostbite-cold but
certainly uncomfortable, especially in a world of uninsulated houses with grass
roofs and ill-fitted doors, where 40 degrees can feel extremely unpleasant--
but the sun set at 6pm so we were done with the fireworks by 8 and able to
retreat to our sleeping bags. It was a nice party-- good food, sports to watch,
people to talk with, etc. It was nice to get out of the village for a little
while-- in Peace Corps we get the 4th, Thanksgiving, and all Zambian holidays
off, and since the 4th and 5th are both Zambian holidays I get to have a nice
long weekend, meet with Peace Corps friends, eat good food, etc.

I'll head back to the
village tomorrow-- I have a program each Wednesday at the school working with
the students during their "farming period" to teach them organic
gardening (and hypothetically I'm also working with the school's enivironmental
education and HIV/AIDS clubs, though in 2 terms the school clubs have yet to
have a single meeting), and then Thursday I'm making compost with a farmer on
the other side of my village. I feel like getting in and out of my village gets
easier the longer I'm here-- not just because I'm a better bike rider and in
better shape, but because I’m much more integrated in my community now. A year or even 6 months ago I’d leave my
village for a day and come back feeling like I’d missed something important,
like I was out of the loop again, a visitor in a strange land; now I know my
village well enough that I can go away for a week and I’ll still be a part of
the community when I get back. I’ll have
programs and projects and meetings, and time spent outside my village is not
the interruption it once was. Life in
the village is hard for a lot of reasons, but it gets progressively easier.

I’d like to wish you
all a very happy anniversary of our nation’s independence. If it weren’t for the US I wouldn’t be here,
in this amazing place having this life-changing experience. Thank you Peace Corps, and thank you USA.

Whatever your plans
for this holiday, I hope you’ll comment and share them with me—I love hearing
from all of you, in letters or online or however you prefer, and just because I’m
far away doesn’t mean I’m not thinking of my loved ones back home. I recently (thanks dad!) got a new laptop
with skyping abilities, so if you’re interested in chatting face-to-face my
brand new skype name is elise.j.simons and I’d love to catch up with you. I hope you had a memorable 4^th of
July, and 3^rd and 5^th and all the rest.

And I hope your
fireworks didn’t set anything on fire.

My Second Zambian Vacation

I apologize for the length of time between blog postings-- my laptop caught a virus and imploded back in February, and using the one office computer for the length of time necessary to write a blog post is depressing (the computer is all by itself in a dark, tiny office at the end of the compound, far from the living room where the majority of the population dwell with their laptops), so I haven't been able to bring myself to write. However, thanks to a generous donation from the Simons foundation (my father), I now have a brand new laptop from which to check e-mails, write blog posts, and talk to all my friends on skype (so if you're looking for a face-to-face discussion, drop me a line), so hopefully I'll be posting on this blog more often now. If not, blame YouTube.

I have not been in my village much this past month-- I was in Lusaka in mid-May with the other 40+ volunteers from my intake for a week-long midterm conference, where our Peace Corps bosses had several meetings with us in groups and individually to make sure we were all still happy and healthy after a year in rural Africa. There was a medical exam and a dental exam, and lots of sitting in the waiting room waiting for the dental exam. What I remember most from the experience was Lusaka food-- pizza, subway, chocolate milkshakes, cake, pumpkin ravioli, french fries, etc. Not that I don't love nshima in the village, but it was nice to indulge a little. One evening a bunch of us were on a bus heading toward a restaurant-- 20+ young foreigners on a nice, touristy-looking bus-- when one cab driver at a gas station shouted "WELCOME TO ZAMBIA" at us, which would have been a lovely welcome if it hadn't been 16 months late. We had a lot of fun.

After a week in Lusaka, a bunch of us traveled to Central Province for a luncheon to celebrate Peace Corps' 50th anniversary. We invited volunteers, staff, and local Zambian officials and counterparts. It was a lot of work to put it all together but I think the end result was rather pleasing, though between that and the trip to Lusaka we were all exhausted. The food, again, was the best part. It's a good thing I have a 20km bike ride to my site or I'd gain 50 pounds.

Next I got to take a 4-day detour to my village, make a beehive with my beekeeping group, get stung 3 times around the eyes, read a book, go to a meeting at school that turned out to be canceled, and then it was back to Serenje and then Lusaka again for a vacation with my mother and my sister.

They arrived Saturday evening, jetlagged and sore and without their checked luggage, which luckily we were able to retrieve completely intact by Monday. We checked out the Sunday market at Arcades for some souveniers, visited my training host family in Chongwe on Monday, and drove up to see my village on Tuesday. We rented a car and driver from Benmak and I highly recommend it, the whole process was much less stressful with someone else in charge of transit. They really enjoyed meeting both my families-- my Chongwe family, whom I haven't seen since September, were overjoyed to see us, and I got to meet two young, adorable additions to the family (3 if you count the new dog, but he had fleas and wasn't very cute). At my site they got the tour of my house, garden, watering hole, kitchen, stove, dish-drying rack, outdoor shower, pit latrine, and cat (my grandmother brought him out like some sort of sacrificial offering to the muzungus, which terrified him so much that he ran off and didn't come back before we left). My grandmother also demonstrated nshima-cooking for my mom and sister, and then we all got to try local Zambian food. It was awesome, my families were wonderful hosts and guests respectively, and I was really happy with the whole experience.

The second half of our vacation involved a trip to Livingstone to see Victoria Falls. The lodge where we stayed, Fawlty Towers, was really nice-- and cheap!-- and had a pool, good food, comfy beds, etc. They also offered free bus rides to the falls every morning, so we went to the falls our first day (Friday). I had been to the falls back in December and I wasn't expecting this visit to be much different, but boy was I wrong! The waterfall was engorged with the past 6 months of violent rain storms, and the mist was so high you could see it miles away. Walking inside the park felt like walking through a rainforest during a storm-- water from the falls dripped down on us through the trees, flooded the pathways and and obscured the waterfall itself with fog that occassionally parted to reveal glimpses of the water behind. We had to rent raincoats (a dollar each) from vendors at the park entrance, and even so we got pretty drenched. It was truly a memorable experience. Who knew there was a place in Zambia where it rained during the dry season?

That afternoon we went on a game drive in Mosi-oa-tunya National Park. We saw giraffes, elephants, wildebeast, impala, waterbuck, warthogs, and several birds. The real highlight, however, was getting out of the vehicle and following one of the full-time "rhino guards" to see the oldest of the only 7 white rhinos remaining in Zambia. We got to stand pretty close to him-- he was busy eating and not much interested in us-- and I took lots of pictures (which were on Emily's camera, so I'll have to get the pictures back from her). He looked a bit like an elephant mated with a warthog. Really cool that we got to get so close to him!

On Saturday Emily and I took a canoe trip on the Zambezi and saw some hippos, and then in the evening Mom joined us to watch the sunset on the water and we got to see some crocodiles, hippos, and birds. Sunday we had a quiet final day, walked around Livingstone, and bought a few souveniers. It was sad and painful to leave them yesterday morning-- and not just because I was looking at 12+ hours on a bus from Livingstone to Serenje. I already miss them both and I really enjoyed their visit.

So that's May in a nutshell. Rainy season has ended, as I mentioned, and harvest season has begun. It is also "cold" season-- never lower than 40 degrees, but that feels pretty cold in an uninsulated house. This is not peak work-in-the-fields season, so hypothetically people will be more available to work with me, but of course they'll also be less interested in working because it's (relatively) cold and dark. So we'll see-- I'm heading back to the village now, ready to get back into the swing of things. I'll write again soon. Wish me luck!

One Year In

A year and a week ago today, I was cold, stressed, and panicked. The cold was a normal consequence of living in New England in February; the panicked was because I couldn’t strike the right weight balance between my two checked bags and my carry-on and my stupid ipod wouldn’t load the two years worth of music and movies and tv shows I was attempting to bring with me; the stressed was because, well, what else would you feel when embarking on a two-year commitment to live in a foreign country?

Last weekend I talked to my mother on the one-year anniversary of speaking to her in person. On a Saturday afternoon one year ago she put me on a bus in Portland and stood outside the tinted windows waving and trying to guess what seat I was in (I eventually pushed my hand to the window to give her smile a general direction) until the bus pulled out of the station. A year ago Sunday I was eating Valentine’s Day brunch with my grandparents and extended family; a year ago Monday I was so nervous I lost my first breakfast and had to eat a second one (waffles. They were really good. Thanks, Dad). A year ago Tuesday I said good-bye to my college roommate (who just happens to live in Philly where we had staging), and with her the last familiar remnants of my American life, and gave her the winter jacket I had been wearing, as I wouldn’t be needing it where I was going.

A year ago Thursday I was exhausted, overheated, out-of-shape and carrying my weight in luggage, staring at the bright African sunlight outside the international airport in Lusaka, Zambia. I had been awake (mostly) since Tuesday morning. My arms were sore from the first round of vaccinations. My back was sore from the midnight bus ride to JFK, the hours-long wait in the terminal, and the excruciatingly long plane ride to South Africa (about 12 hours, but when you add in the time difference it’s nearly an entire day). That afternoon I had my first of many lessons in patience: due to a miscommunication, our welcoming committee was a few hours late, so we just sat, 48 young Americans not quite dressed for the climate surrounded by a ridiculously large amount of luggage, exhausted and still essentially strangers (we had only know each other a couple days, though it felt much longer), waiting. It was a beautiful sunny day; across from the shaded sidewalk where we stood, a large billboard loomed over a manicured lawn, announcing that Africa’s time was coming: “let’s show the world what we can do!”

Today, a year later, the weather is warm— these days I put on a fleece jacket in 50-degree weather and try to remember what real cold, what snow, feels like. Today if I had to pack a bag for a two-year adventure it would be half as heavy as the one I packed a year ago, and even if it wasn’t my bike-and-garden-worn body would be much more equipped to carry it. Today I am shocked at marvels such as being able to print a document from a computer in a different room (seriously, I just did this. The computer and the printer were on different sides of the compound. It’s amazing. Why didn’t I notice how cool this was when I did it all the time in college and high school?), and when my little laptop computer inexplicably stopped working yesterday it barely fazed me (I mean, it’s frustrating, but as we say in Zambia, “at least there’s still nshima”).

In the past year I have learned to speak a foreign language; I have learned to ride a bike (yes, I’m 24, shut up); I’ve planted and grown vegetables, cash crops, and trees; taught farmers to build a compost pile; opened a beehive without getting stung; ridden an elephant and pet a lion in the same day; walked on the rim of the biggest waterfall in the world; eaten a caterpillar; lost over 10 kilos; learned to use the metric system; learned to make a fire in a woodstove; and eaten mangoes and guavas fresh off of trees. It has been an absolutely awesome journey, full of adventure, self-discovery, frustration, challenges, and life lessons. If I could talk to my one-year-younger self, I’d tell her this: take a deep breath. Don’t worry about the packing or the ipod. This isn’t the end of the world; on the contrary, it’s the beginning.

Here’s to a second year in Zambia as crazy and surprising and difficult and wonderful as the first. Cheers!

The end of 2010

Happy new year everyone! It’s been a great year for me, as I hope it has been for you. This past month I have been very busy-- so much to write about and so little time to write it.

The first half of the month planting season was in full swing, so I was busy in my village planting my garden and working with various farmers in their fields. I distributed legume seeds to help crops with varying levels of success; no one likes change, and it takes a very special type of farmer to try new things or accept strange ideas. The same can be said for the basin-digging method promoted by the Zambian government: it saves time and labor and increases yield, but many farmers find it stressful and challenging to use this new, more mathematical and methodical style of tilling. They aren’t used to having to measure their fields and basin spacings, they’re used to just digging the whole field in one fell swoop, which is a lot of labor for them and increases erosion and weed germination. Some farmers were so tired from over-digging their other fields that they didn’t want to spend much time practicing the simpler digging method with me. As for the legumes: intercropping legumes with cash crops like maize helps increase nitrogen levels in the soil and increase the overall health of the land and the plants, but very few people are familiar with these plants and trees and are reluctant to plant them in case they do so incorrectly and harm their cash crops, their livelihood, the thing on which their entire family depends. I did manage to get a few farmers on board, and I’ve made it a goal to spend this next year talking to more farmers to prepare for the next planting season.

Around mid-December I bid farewell to my village and traveled by bus (about 12-14 hours) to Chipata in Eastern Province to attend a workshop on appropriate technologies run by an MIT program called D-Lab. The workshop lasted only 4 days; I could have happily worked for longer, especially since the shortness of the workshop meant many of our projects were left unfinished. Some of our projects included maize shellers, fuel-efficient stoves, corn cob charcoal, hand washers, and mango pickers, juicers, and slicers. While the technology itself was cool-- effective but still simple enough to be easily accessible to villagers-- what was more important was the inventive mindset we were practicing. In a country where schools teach through route memorization and standardized tests, it’s great to give creative minds an opportunity to think outside the box, to encourage them to find solutions to problems and not wait for the solution to be dropped into their laps. By thinking creatively, our Zambian counterparts may invent even better contraptions than the ones that already exist. My own counterpart started out asking me what we were doing and how we were doing it, but by the end of the workshop he had stopped following my lead and he was bossing me around. ;-)

After Chipata I returned to Lusaka and then traveled south to spend the holidays in Livingstone. On Christmas Eve I crossed the border into Botswana and entered Chobe National Park, the Elephant Capital of the World. We went on a boat tour and saw elephants swimming right by us, which was pretty cool. We also saw a leopard out in broad daylight, surprisingly. We spent the night in the camp, sleeping in huge canvas tents and drinking wine at table-clothed tables. It was an interesting merger of English colonial influence and the African bush-- it was a very classy sort of camping experience. I just hoped Santa didn’t get mauled by lions on his way through our camp…

Christmas day was more elephants and some lions, plus Christmas brunch in the camp with mimosas. In the afternoon it rained so hard it hailed and I got soaked! Despite the soaking and the lack of wrapped gifts or snow or pine trees, it was still a really great way to spend Christmas.
Christmas day we returned to Livingstone and stayed through the new year. I got to ride an elephant and pet a lion-- that was quite an eventful day! The elephants were part of an elephant sanctuary; the lions were young cubs raised in captivity but taught to follow their instincts so they could one day be reintegrated into the wild. The lion program faces a strange paradox: funding for the program comes from tourists wanting to walk with and pet the lions, but the presence of the tourists must make the lions used to people and slightly more tame, which it against the intent of the program. So the tourist industry helps and hinders the program’s ambitions simultaneously.

On new years ever I visited Victoria Falls. It is truly a site to behold. A bunch of us walked along the top of the falls to a pool where we could look down over the edge to where the water fell into mist. It sounds dangerous but was actually pretty safe-- the current was not very strong, so it was a bit like wading through water back home, except if you fell and didn’t get back up right away you might be swept the 50 ft. downriver and over the edge. The pool itself was right at the edge of the falls, so that was quite a sight to see. Overall it was an invigorating experience; a great way to start the new year! That evening I went on a sunset cruise and watched the African sun set over the last day of the year. Good-bye 2010, it’s been real.

So that’s my very busy December in a nutshell. While I missed being in my village, it was nice to get out for awhile and see other things. I feel rejuvenated, energized, ready to go. Of course I also feel sick because I spent 10 days sharing a hostel room with 16 other germ-carrying people, one of whom stole my cell phone, but I’m not gonna let this cold bring me down. I think 2011 is going to be a very good year.