Introducing Jimmy!

A couple of weeks ago a little boy from a few houses away turned up at our gate with a skinny little three month old puppy with a gammy leg. Some big doses of TLC and a couple of trips to the vet later and she’s a crazy little pup that growls when she wants attention, has tried to eat 1000 Kwacha notes, whilst refusing to chew her dog bone and gets so excited when we come home or wake up in the morning that she pees herself…wonderful!

Anyway here’s some pictures of the crazy little might as promised.

P.S we named her before checking what sex she was!

Wonderful weekends

During our first month or two in Chipata I thought that weekends were going to be pretty boring. I was worried we’d have a bit too much time to contemplate what we were missing from home. But, with work getting more and more frustrating our sleepy Chipata and our ‘empty’ weekends are turning out to be exactly what the doctor ordered.

This weekend was no exception.

We were in bed on Friday night by 8:30, we’d had a ‘late’ night (11 o’clock) on Thursday after pie and mash at Richard’s. So I was wide awake at 6am Saturday morning. After our weekend habit of dippy eggs and toasted soldiers I finished the last few chapters of my book: ‘As used on the famous Nelson Mandela’ written by the comedian Mark Thomas. It is a very funny but bleak condemnation of the international arms trade. Well worth the read.

There’s been a break in the rains this past week which is great for using our solar heated shower bag. We’re still waiting for the landlord to fit a hot water tank – I’ve got a feeling we shouldn’t hold our breath.

One thing I won’t miss about living in Chipata is having to do all our washing by hand. I thought I was being sensible when I packed a cream linen skirt, a couple of white shirts and numerous white vests. Nope, my linen skirt has permanent browny-red spots from the mud flicking up when I’m cycling through puddles and my white tops are now a grubby shade of orange. To make matters worse Zambians, no matter how poor, are always immaculately dressed. Anyway, this weekend we made the most of the sunshine and spent a couple of hours standing over the laundry bucket.

Saturday early afternoon Henry (a colleague of Henry’s) popped round for a sarnie and interestingly asked me what I knew about anorexia. Interesting because the desirable body image here is definitely not super-model thin. Instead, women are admired for their curvacious hips and bottoms and ironically whilst Brits spend too much time on sun beds and fake tans many girls here spend too much money on skin lightening cream.

Saturday afternoon we thought we’d check out the swimming pool that belongs to a campsite just up the road from us. We’re weren’t sure whether it was open to the public but tourists are scarce this time of year so we thought we’d try our luck. We turned off the main road when we saw a sign for the campsite and continued for about 1 ¾ klms up a dirt track at which point we thought we must have misread the sign and turned back. Back at the main road the sign pointing up the dirt track read ‘Campsite 2klm’ Damn it! We turned round and cycled, for the third time, past the perplexed faces of some young girls doing their laundry in a stream and an old white-bearded white man driving a tractor. We reached the campsite only to find out that it is not usually open to sweaty members of the public after all Zambia’s Vice-President had stayed there last night. Off we set back down the 2klm long dirt track passing whispers of ‘crazy muzungus’ as we went.

Thankfully, there’s another, more welcoming, lodge fifteen minutes up the road that does allow smelly volunteers into their pool. (And this one played host to the President of Zambia last year!) A game of frisbee, a quick dip and a plate of delicious homemade chips later we’d forgotten all about the eight klm round trip we’d taken to get there. The cycle back was a bit of an uphill struggle but I quickly stopped my moaning when we passed a man carrying huge sacks of charcoal on the back of his bike. This prompted Henry to write his long awaited blog about climate change.
Saturday evening we were invited for dinner at Alok’s, a VSO volunteer from Indian and as you can imagine the food was superb. He’d told us the week before when I’d served him up my lame attempt at lasagne that he couldn’t cook – I think he was just being kind. Sat round the dinner table were Malcolm and Elaine – self confessed ‘golden gappers’ VSOs who’ve taken early retirement to share skills and change lives, Denis a volunteer from Uganda, Alok from India and the slightly less exotic Henry and I. The conversation was almost as diverse as our backgrounds ranging from the problem of population growth in developing countries to church bell ringing.

Sunday was a little less exciting. Cornflakes and toast for brekkie, a chapter or two of my new book (cheers Ann) and another round of laundry. We took a stroll around about where we live. If you walk to the end of our street you reach what looks like waste land and feel like you’re deep in the bush but if you look a little closer every spare square inch is covered in tall stalks of maize and banana trees.

We’ve just got back from tea and Christmas cake at Malcolm and Elaines. The Christmas cake turned up in a package that was posted in the UK on October 16th! And now I’m sitting on the veranda waiting eagerly for dinner of nutroast, roast potatoes and gravy courtesy of Master Chef McLaughlin. All seems rather British!

Third of the way through...

…not that I’m counting but it’s definitely time for another rant.

So what do I have to show for the past four months?

One of the first things I decided to do when I arrived at my placement was a baseline survey/needs assessment kind-of-thing. It was obvious that the peer educators had huge potential but they lacked focus. They choose the activities that they think are most effective and deliver the same old messages. Before I could argue that these were outdated and weren’t based on what was actually happening in their communities I figured I needed some evidence. I also needed to get the coordinators thinking about how they could evaluate the effectiveness of their programme activities beyond counting the amount of people who were watching their drama performance. So…two months behind schedule the results are finally in and some are pretty interesting.

We asked over 150 young people aged between 15 and 26 what were the most important issues that affect them and their friends. Many gave answers that you’d expect from any teenager no matter what continent they lived on, things like ‘lack of good friends,’ ‘boys/girls,’ ‘peer pressure’ and ‘lack of recreational facilities’. But, overwhelmingly (and thankfully in support of our projects) issues related to HIV and sexual health came out on top. Other popular answers reminded me that we’re working in one of the world’s poorest countries, things like unemployment, prostitution, inability to pay education fees, early or forced marriages, lack of adequate shelter, water sanitation and medication.

But, some of the answers had us in fits of giggles. One question on the survey asked ‘Do you feel you need to gain more knowledge and skills? If so, what?’ One respondent answered ‘I want to be a Kapenta.’ Kapenta are small, really really smelly, dried fish that are sold by the cup load on the side of the road. I only hope he meant that he wanted to be a Carpenter.

Another survey asked bar owners ‘Is there any educational literature in the bar?’ One person answered ‘No’ but to the follow-up question ‘In what language is the literature?’ they answered ‘Nyanja’. The same questionnaire stated that the bar employed no staff but in answer to ‘Who will attend the bar workers training course?’ the respondent answered ‘the bar owner and the bar worker’ – utterly confusing.

Almost everybody could give three ways in which HIV is transmitted confirming that ten-or-so years of awareness raising campaigns has been partly successful but the challenge now is to turn this knowledge into a permanent shift in attitudes and sustained behaviour change. Over 75% of the young people asked admitted that they were sexually active, little more than 50% had used a condom and less than half had been for VCT (Voluntary Counselling and Testing). What this now means is that I have my ammunition – young people in Chipata ARE having sex, promoting abstinence is important and has its place but condoms and other prevention methods must be part of the solution.

Since Christmas, I’ve largely been working to develop project plans for each of the groups I work with based on the results of these surveys. This has meant having to explain what the difference between an aim or goal and an objective is over and over – each time I launch into an explanation I manage to confuse myself a little more. After narrowing down the objectives from a possible twenty or so to four or five, we’ve been thinking of activities that will help us to achieve them and have been setting some measurable targets. Now, everyone has agreed to the programme plans, knows what the activities and targets are, but still someone tells me ‘next week we want to go to a school in x to talk about y.’ Now, this would be fine if it wasn’t for the fact that ‘x’ is usually not in our agreed catchment area and ‘y’ does not fit into our agreed objectives ..arrggghhhhhhhh!

Now if this kind of thing happened with one organisation then I think I could take a step back, breath deeply and calmly explain where it’s gone wrong. But it happens with ALL THREE of the organisations time and time again. I could understand it if I’d gone ahead and planned the projects without their input and fallen foul of the ‘know-it-all Westerner syndrome’ but all I did was put what we’d decided together into legible English. …I’m half way to giving up.

No…that’s not true I’m no where near giving up but am ever-so-slightly frustrated (ok, very frustrated) but determined to get everything running half way to smoothly before my time is up. The biggest thing in my way seems to be working for three organisations at once. I can’t do anything to the standard I want, or support the coordinators as much as is necessary. I decide every other day that I want to stop working with one and concentrate on the other but those I choose to stick with are never consistent day to day. More positively, if I’ve had a rough day at one place there’ll be something good happening the next day at another.

I’m sending off my first funding applications this week. The programmes still have no money in the budget apart from the measly volunteer allowances and I hope that some decent equipment and money for transport, photocopying etc. will make all the difference.

Having said that one group have completely baffled me. From October to January they were my star group, always turning up to meetings, eager for something to do, enthusiastically carrying out any task I set them. But in January their donors released some funds for their allowances (these had been frozen at the beginning of last year because someone had emptied the organisations bank accounts into their own pockets). Since then the numbers who have been turning up to meetings and activities has halved. Where’s the logic in that? They worked really, really hard when they were getting absolutely nothing and then when there’s money up for grabs half of them disappear.

Have I already mentioned I’m a little confused?