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?

Zambia - some random thoughts

Since arriving in Zambia over three months ago, Henry and I have had endless conversations and more than one disagreement over whether there really is any hope for Zambia? Henry sees things more positively than me, perhaps because poverty in Africa is less visible than he’d imagined. We’ve mulled this question over with each other, with other VSOs and with our Zambian colleagues – and every time I get a little more confused and a little less certain of which direction Zambia is headed.

Of course, if Zambia didn’t face quite a few challenges we wouldn’t be here and it wouldn’t be ranked 165th out of 177 on the Human Development Index but just as there are many cracks below the surface in Britain, you don’t have to look too far in Zambia to feel optimistic.

Last week, one of the organisations I’m working for got some money in the bank for the first time in almost a year and started to pay its volunteers three months’ worth of allowances. A mistake was made, and one girl, who had been volunteering for only one month, got the full amount. As far as I can tell it was an honest mistake, a pretty significant one, but honest nonetheless. The manager hit the roof. Saying that, if permanent members of staff were dishonest, what hope was there for the future? She sent the coordinator off to chase after the money, saying that if it wasn’t returned she would deduct it from his (the person who made the mistake’s) wages. The money was returned, everyone was paid the rightful amount and we all went back to work.

Contrast this with another organisation we’re aware of that, before Christmas, received some funding and now, only weeks later it’s emerged that about an eighth can’t be accounted for. The manager’s response when asked went something like; ‘it wasn’t me, I haven’t touched it.’

My point is that in a country where corruption (or “Chiphuphu” as they say in Chipata) is so endemic it was really encouraging and even heart-warming to see a Managing Director so outraged by the slightest hint of wrongdoing.

Corruption, as frustrating and upsetting as it is, at some times seems understandable. If the wages you’re paid aren’t enough for you to buy lunch then why not bump up your transport cost claims just a little. It happens in the UK. Unfortunately, those in a position to add a little extra to their allowances are those who have already risen to a position of power. And to be able to rise to a powerful position you first have to know the right people. I asked a well qualified peer educator why he couldn’t get a job and he said he didn’t have ‘the right face’. What he meant was it didn’t matter how many certificates you had, or how much voluntary work you’d done if your uncle wasn’t on the managing committee or your cousin hadn’t put a good word in for you, you stood no chance.

On top of this there are very few jobs for young people to apply for. Henry works with a group of young people who have all finished secondary school and a large handful of them will have passed their grade 12 certificate with flying colours no doubt. But they struggle to get jobs or rather there aren’t many jobs for them to apply for. Many of the peer educator’s I work with have piles of certificates bearing their names in counselling, in peer education, in basic health care, in treatment adherence but still they scrape a living by collecting minimal volunteer allowances from as many different NGOs as they can. Henry tries to convince me that things aren’t so grim, Zambia’s economy is growing at a rate of 5% which means there has to be some more jobs out there somewhere, this week we heard that a couple of young men we know have interviews with local businesses. I don’t doubt that things ARE improving slowly but what do all the unemployed young people do in the meantime, job centres and the dole don’t exist here. And the only recreational activity that doesn’t involve spending non-existent money or drinking excessive amounts of Castle lager is going to church. And for all the good the church does it has a lot to answer for here – but I won’t get started on my condom rant again!.

Although the extended family seems a burden in many circumstances without it, many more Zambians would be left out in the cold. Beatrice, a nurse at Chisomo, is looking after her granddaughter after her own three children passed away. Yoko has been providing for his two siblings and niece ever since his parents passed away when he was in Grade 10. Since becoming a double orphan Henry has lived with his aunt and granddad. I doubt that there are many households in Chipata that don’t look something like this. But, as depressing as this may seem the support of the extended family in a country with a life expectancy of 37 is surely something positive.

Other traditions are less welcome. When a woman is widowed, it is believed that she must be ‘cleansed’. This basically means that a member of her husband’s family – usually the older brother, must have sex with her to free his spirit. When a colleague’s daughter found herself in this situation she refused to return to her home near her in-laws for fear of the sexual cleansing ritual and of being treated like a slave. After all it is still expected that the groom pay a high price for his bride as if buying a piece of property. On the night of her husband’s funeral she was sleeping next to her own mother when her mother-in-law asked to be with her. As she walked into where her mother-in-law was sleeping the pillow she carried was snatched away from her and she was met with cries of ‘my son is lying cold in stone how dare you sleep comfortably tonight!’ Needless to say that she is now living safely with her own mother but many other women aren’t so lucky.

If there was one thing that I think would really make a difference in Zambia it would be for gender norms to shift. And perhaps coming a close second would be for people to start challenging authority. I don’t mean for there to be a revolution and for people to riot on the streets but just for people to speak up when they disagree with something. Last week I was in a meeting with a lady from one of the bigger international agencies working with youth in Chipata, this organisation has a reputation for making a lot of promises but delivering very little. However, I was on my own when it came to asking questions. After she had left, everyone else let rip. Their undeserved respect for an older lady in what appears to be a position of authority zipped their mouths shut in her presence. Zambians are really proud of their peaceful history, unfortunately passive might be a better way to describe the present.

But, on another positive note, obesity, one of the developed world’s worst habits is all but non-existent in Zambia. The abundance of fresh fruit and veg, that hasn’t had to conform to some supermarket stipulated size and colour is one of my favourite things about living in Africa. Lemons are naturally green it seems and apparently you don’t get avocados all year round!?! Unfortunately, it doesn’t translate that Zambian diets are particularly nutritious. Most people – even those that can afford a more varied diet – seem to prefer to eat Nshima (mealie meal) for at least two meals a day. If I remember rightly, Nshima can only offer 25% of a child’s daily nutritional needs.

Another, more positive reason for people looking fit is the amount of exercise people do. Many walk miles every day. Our gardener, for instance, walks for an hour and a half to our house three times a week. I’ve told him time and again that he needn’t get up so early to be at work for 7am, that he can start later but he seems to think nothing of it and knocks on our gate bang on seven without fail. Before Christmas we ordered a double bed for one of the spare rooms from a carpenter in town. We said we’d pay for a flat bed truck to transport it home, instead they insisted there was no need and that they would carry it the 4 miles to our house. We thought they wouldn’t turn up as the day they were due to deliver it, it was pouring down but a soaking wet bed accompanied by four drenched Zambians arrived on our doorstep, no complaints. Henry’s been inspired to start a carbon neutral home removals business that uses only bicycles back in the UK. Unfortunately, I doubt whether it will work back home but it definitely would here.

I could go on and on about the rows of craters that were once roads in Chipata, or the hospital without an X-ray machine, or the family of seventeen living in a house with no roof across the street but I’m in danger of creating a really pessimistic picture of a place that just doesn’t feel so grim. You hardly ever hear a child cry here and I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve been asked for money in the street.

And the most heart warming thing ever happened to me early last week. It was a little wet on the cycle home, I hit a bump and not-so-gracefully came tumbling off my bike. If that wasn’t bad enough somehow, during the fall my toe had got trapped in my front wheel. No matter how much I tried I couldn’t pull it free. No worries, the lady I was swerving to miss when I hit the bump ran over to try and yank it free whilst one man lifted the bike off the road (with the toe still attached) and another dragged me free of on-coming traffic. Teamwork, community spirit and coming to the silly muzungu woman on a bike’s rescue are definitely a tick in Zambia’s favour.