’11 Aug: Zambia

This guy totally wanted to sit on my lap whenever we stopped…

There was one baby and its mother, two who had been raised in the house and constantly wanted to be carried, an old gal who used to drink beer and smoke cigarettes in a bar, and I can’t remember the details of the last one.

Before we entered the enclosure they loaded up our pockets with banana pieces, peanuts, cheese puffs, crackers, etc. We were both feeling a little edgy like there was going to be a crazy feeding frenzy but as it turned out it was a gentle and amusing process as the chimps searched out every morsel.

August 20-22 Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage

This was our drop point coming from Solwezi in The Cruiser. In due course one of the Chimfunshi guys picked us up and we drove back the 12 kilometers to the cabins and then another 8 kilometers to the orphanage.

I’m calling it an orphanage because that’s what they call it but as far as the chimpanzees are concerned it is no longer in any meaningful way an orphanage.

I went for a walk, just for a little stretch and a constitutional, and I heard some lively singing on the air, but from where? Here they come, back from doing the washing.

Posing for a photo…

..and then breaking off to return to their separate homes.

This is the accommodation and education center at Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage.

It was really a delightful two days. We had one of those cabins and we each had our own room. It’s self-catering meaning we cooked all our own meals and shared with a couple of researchers, three volunteers who were there for three weeks, and staff members were always around too.

Only two were small enough to carry, not counting the baby. Chimps get big and grouchy and they bite so the staff have selected carefully for this activity. Still, these are chimps and accidents happen but in more than 20 years only twice, so that’s not bad odds.

Awww.

…and he liked to sit on Mindy’s head.

Here’s a closing shot. Early early the next morning we loaded ourselves into the back of a pick-up truck for the four hour ride to Ndola where I then caught a flight to Johannesburg and from there I took another flight to Cape Town. Mindy hitched back to Serenje.

Bye Mindy! It was GREAT!

Pick me up! Pick me up!

We had already decided to do the Bush Walk which was a little controversial in my mind, interacting so personally with what are supposed to be wild animals but once there and having seen the operation I thought oh, this Bush Walk, what the heck.

Dominick was our guide and took all the following pictures with my camera. As you can see we had to wear protective clothing and we were not allowed to carry anything, no glasses, no jewelry, etc.

I can see how people get stuck on these chimps, they are so adorable when they’re small (until they’re not when they get big – even Michael Jackson had to send Bubbles away when he got big).

But before we get to the chimpanzees let’s meet Billy, the pet hippopotamus and Sheila Siddel, there she is in the window of her sitting room.

Wildlife rangers brought Billy here as a baby and Sheila and her husband let him live in the house until he was too big to get in and out the doors. Yes. A pet hippopotamus.

…for apples and bread loaves and gigantic bottles of warm milk.

He goes wherever he wants except they’ve blocked him out of the house. But still he hangs around, waiting…

In 1983 Sheila and her husband took on their first orphaned chimp. Each chimp that came here had a story and a name. They haven’t taken any new chimps for six years because they don’t have enough resources to handle more.

But the thing is, there are tons and tons of baby and adolescent chimps that have been born on the property and will never be released. None of the chimps here could ever be released into the wild. Chimpanzees live 40-60 years and every time they let a chimp breed they are adding just another dependent to their system.

Much as they want to make a natural life for the chimps here, which is part of the justification for all the breeding, there is nothing at all natural about it.

The above pictures are from feeding time when the chimps go nuts. It’s an unsettling sight. Also unsettling – some of the chimps are escape artists, or always fighting, and are housed in very restrictive accommodation away from the others.

I would understand so much better if in fact they were taking care of animals that would not survive otherwise, but because all the born-in-captivity chimps have stretched them beyond their ability to take care of new animals that could use their help, that part is a problem.

They say they are using birth control on the females but have not been able to catch them all in time, which would be every few months. I don’t know…there were SO many (aDORable) babies.

August 20

Following are some random things I’ve been doing over the week of the Appropriate Technology Workshop here at the Peace Corps facility in Solwezi.

A version of the mega-church. You see a lot of this type of church throughout the countryside. As I’ve mentioned a few times before because it is omnipresent, Zambia is a very Christian country and every time I visited with a Zambian for more than a view minutes that person would ask me ‘where do you pray?’.

I took a taxi out to visit the Kifubwa Rock Stream Shelter, a National Monument, known for its Stone Age carvings.

This fellow is an official at the park who took it upon himself to walk with me and the taxi driver and give us the low down.

It’s a good thing too that he came to flesh out the story since this is pretty much it. The carvings are on the left, graffiti is on the right.

I got my hair washed! Cleeean Head YAY!!

A few of the newer businesses along the main drag have set themselves back from the road, paved a walkway into the establishment, and with grass or brick created a little dust-break which is most welcome.

I ate lunch out.

Bream, and it was perfect. Wanting something other than the nshima-white rice-white bread-white pasta-fried potatoes that are the base of most meals here, I asked for two vegetables instead. These are two of the kinds of vegetables made to eat with nshima, cut in ribbons and cooked in large quantities of oil.

More views around town.

I washed dishes – my small contribution to the running of the household.

This is what the kitchen often looked like when I got up in the morning, a little distorted by the pano.

Every day I walked to the mecca of Solwezi, the Shop-Rite. It took about 15-20 minutes depending on how many cars came by to kick up clouds of dust which always slowed me down. One day it seemed they were doing a little road work.

On the morning of the 20th we left Solwezi with the dawn, and The Cruiser that was heading to Lusaka. We got dropped off at the side of the road where the folks from Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage would be picking us up for a two night stay.

I was hot for the fuel efficent stoves. Here’s one that runs on sawdust which they give away at the sawmills, the sawdust, not the stove. So if you live anywere near a sawmill this baby’s for you.

This is the local building material used in every village in Zambia. They dig a hole like the one you see and make these bricks and then hold the bricks together with the same material.

They built a grain storage system, a stove, something else I don’t remember…

There was a nice turn-out and everyone was pleased.

The building you see is what they call the back house. There’s an office there, the volunteer’s bar, storage, and a bathroom that yesterday had hot water. It was a dribble but mixed with a dribble of cold water you could wash yourself. Ahhh!

…and this system for making charcoal out of corncobs. In theory the overall amount of smoke produced making and using corncob briquettes is supposed to be superior to making charcoal out of trees, and the corncobs pile up in mountains, the one ingredient in nshima.

It’s not that local people don’t notice the dust and the smoke, they definitely do – every taxi driver mentions it.

Team photos!

August 19

It’s the last day of the conference and they’ve invited folks from around town, business owners, government officials, representatives from other aid organizations, to come on over and have a look.

Passing The Torch.

Mindy and Alex (on the far right) have been leading the AT project but their third-year service is coming to an end. They are moving on and Severn and Brittney are taking over.

Mindy and some of the guys who work for Peace Corps, names and jobs forthcoming.

On the third day all the participants worked on their building projects and today, the fourth day, volunteers and The Cruiser went out to the local orphanage to ask a few of the women who work there if they would come over, look at some of the projects and give feedback and suggestions.

Don’t those two look like they belong in a goofy college-pranks movie?

They seemed quite happy to come and all had good ideas to share and it looked like they were enjoying the process so it went very well for everyone.

I have plenty of pictures of the projects and of these two days of demonstrations but it’s getting late so those’ll wait, no problem, because we had babies.

Women critiquing an idea for storage.

August 17-18

When babies are around it’s nearly impossible to look at anything else.

I held this baby for a long time, so the woman could concentrate on the presentations, yeah, that’s the reason, so the woman could concentrate on the presentations.

A system to store and deliver peanuts.

August 16

The Appropriate Technology workshop for the North-West Province, Zambia. Peace Corps is doing these conferences and setting up Appropriate Technology centers at all the six provincial houses. Appropriate Technology even has its own wiki entry.

Designed in collaboration between the Peace Corps and MIT, this program is meant to introduce to the villages in Zambia useful technologies appropriate to village life, meaning whatever you propose it has to be cheap, it can be fabricated from local materials, it has to work without electricity, and the villagers have to see a benefit in changing from their current methods.

Peace Corps brings in 8-9 of their volunteers from a province who have expressed interest in participating, and they bring the volunteer’s counterpart.

The counterpart is the person, usually chosen by the village committee when it applies for a volunteer to come, to be the point-person between the village and the volunteer. Usually this person is a teacher and the best English speaker in the village. But that doesn’t mean the counterpart can speak English in any meaningful way.

(I just learned that in this case the volunteer chose a counterpart who they think will be the best person for this workshop.)

At this conference there are speakers of five different primary languages so there’s a lot of translating going on often in multiple languages.

…and ends with demonstrations of low-tech approaches to some common issues.

From the top-left around:
1) grinding nuts, nut butter being a staple of the local diet, in an inexpensive meat grinder. The meat grinder can grind in minutes what it takes a villager all day to pound.
2) A big favorite, attaching a cell-phone charger, built from the readily available components of a bicycle light, to charge the phone from a bike.
3) more pedal power, this one a maize shelling device.
4) creating a food cooler with two clay pots and sand.

Peace Corps Volunteers top left around:
Ashley, Britney, Jim, Hunter, Jack, Sevren, Mindy, Ashley

The day begins with discussions…

Between the beginning and the end we have tea time and lunch…

…and projects.

More about the projects tomorrow.

Boss the dog. As in ‘No Boss, NO’.

So, we were out of power for hours this morning and then when the power came back the water went off. When the water came back I didn’t have time to get into the shower before the power kept kicking off in the house and we had to unplug the water heater. Then the valve in the water tower wouldn’t shut off and the yard flooded all night and now it’s tomorrow and no shower. Not that interesting I know – just keeping you in the utilities loop.

We passed the bus station and this worked out great because in this one picture you can see the mini-buses, the middle-sized bus (that is what everyone calls it) and a long distance bus too.

They can fit 18 people plus driver in those mini-buses, not counting laps.

I asked this guy if I could take a picture of his shop, he had such great signs. There are rows of shops like this, one or two man operations doing very specialized work.

The week-long workshop on Appropriate Technologies has started at the Peace Corps house. I’m taking pictures but since there is going to be five days I’ll make one story at the end, so as not to get too many duplicates…is the plan anyway.

I went into town with Mindy in The Cruiser to get some supplies for the seminar. Solwezi is a regular metropolis compared to Serenje and you can tell by the dust and the smoke, no stars for me at night.

Add to this dust and smoke 16 people smoking cigarettes (it’s like an AA meeting around the house with all the coffee and cigarettes, except for the beer, what with all that beer…in that way it’s not like an AA meeting) and the air has changed properties from a gas to a solid.

While we were out with The Cruiser it was a two minute detour to drop me off at the Royal Solwezi Hotel, the fanciest hotel in town.

I hung around as I like to do but I will say that the fanciest hotel in Solwezi didn’t have any newspapers or magazines and both of the computers they have for guests are broken and the food was not even very good.

But they had a nice outside patio with comfy chairs, International CNN playing on the TV, and service from the bar/restaurant so thumbs up.

August 14-15

On the 14th we were out of power from around 6:30PM until 11AM on the 15th and on the evening of the 15th it went out again but this time came back by 9:30PM which is why I can write this.

At Kapiri, which is a gas station, a place to buy greasy road food, and a plant of some sort, we began our hitch.

We walked down the road until we were separate from all the local hitchhikers. Public transportation is non-existent on some routes, like where we were going for example, and so few people own private cars that hitchhiking is universal.

It is a fact of hitchhiking that people in nice cars don’t tend to pick up local people. We got picked up so fast on every leg of our journey and two out of the three times in great vehicles. I propose it was because they didn’t want to leave an old lady by the side of the road. And I waved, and smiled, and made eye contact.

August 11-13 Solwezi

We left Sarenje at 6AM by middle-sized bus heading for Kapiri where a Peace Corps Cruiser was supposed to pick us up but due to a very last minute ‘schedule change’ we were going to have to hitchhike the many many more hours to our destination in the Copper Belt.

This is a middle-sized bus, bigger than the mini-buses that run through the towns, but smaller than a long-distance bus.

They pack these guys to the roof with people and their belongings. Packed such that you get shoveled into your space and you just stay like that waiting for it to be over.

I never saw these gourd vessels for sale and then there were 20 stands along the side of the road.

El-Lec-TRICTY! YAY!!

The Copper Belt is the most developed of the provinces in Zambia, and the most prosperous due to all the mines so it is not surprising to find power.

This was our first ride, a South African welder who works in the mines alongside his father and brother-in-law. He had one of those trucks with a back seat and Air-Con and we were ridin’ in style.

It was true in Botswana also, that if you ran into a white person that person probably had a South African connection, or Zimbabwean, Zimbabwe has a big white ex-pat community.

He dropped us at the fork in the road where he had to turn left and we had to go right.

We were very soon picked up by a woman from Zimbabwe who re-located to Zambia and runs a farm with her husband. I had the seat and the kids rode in the back with the grain.

She went many kilometers out of her way to drop us at a good place to get our next ride, which turned out to be the last we needed since the driver was going all the way into Solwezi. He was an Indian guy from Tanzania, had a wonderful vehicle and he drove fast. We were in hitchhiking heaven!

He had to drop us a block from our destination, the Shop-Rite**, because of this parade about to begin. There’s going to be an election here in a month and we’ve been running into a lot of electioneering, mostly flatbed trucks with huge speakers blaring music and full of people chanting in the back.

**Wow, A Shop-Rite! At the Shop-Rite you can get anything even little $4 cans of tuna and $8 packages of grapes. It’s like the Nirvana of shopping at the Shop-Rite when you’ve come from the town that runs out of beer and if the chicken guy has to go to a funeral you can’t buy any chicken.

One thing I was not expecting was power problems in Solwezi. On-Off-On-Off, it was very disconcerting. Yesterday they did a pre-arranged shut-down for the whole day to try to fix the problem for good.

I was in town and took this picture. Just as I got the shot off a guy came up behind me and grabbed the camera(!) by throwing his hand over the lens. What?! “It is forbidden. FORBIDDEN!” he said a few times. OK OK, I won’t take a picture.

Now as I type this it is almost dinner time on the 14th. My clothes that I washed in a bucket this morning are on the line and relatively clean, I took a fantastic hot shower HOT! shower and am relatively clean, I’ve caught-up on my pictures, I’ve got reservations and everything set for my last week in Cape Town. So let’s go see what the Copper Belt is all about!

I had a wonderful walk with the dog. It was so much fun. We just went off and he led the way out most of the time and led the way back all of the time. The bush is criss-crossed with walking paths that lead from one compound to another.

Some inside views of Erin’s hut.

On the way back we found some neighbor kids over with the host family, buying some dried fish. Two kids in front live there and the others are the neighbors.

August 9-10 Erin’s Village, Muchinka, in The Bush

We left early in The Cruiser for the trip out into the bush. It’s not too far, less than two hours, and when we arrived we relaxed in the insaka where cooking, eating, and socializing occur.

That’s Erin’s hut straight ahead, her storage building to the right, and her pit toilet on the left. Her host family’s compound is behind us and within sight.

After our rest and a snack we headed out along the trail to see Erin’s projects. The trail leads through some very pretty countryside and also an area of marsh that is goopy wet in the rainy season.

Erin host family has a 10 year old nephew living with them that Erin has taken to her heart. He was with us the whole time.

The local school. These schools are very very poor. Poor in resources with a few ancient books, no teaching materials at all, some rough wood benches, so poor inside I felt uncomfortable to take a picture (which I don’t really understand), and poor because none of the teachers want to be here. Zambians go into teaching to get out of places like this with no electricity, no running water, no money, an uneducated population.

It is here that Erin was getting a building for a resource center/library built, although she is leaving in two weeks and it isn’t ‘quite’ done. We are all crossing our fingers that she’ll still be around for an opening ceremony.

Getting a Peace Corps project done-done is a major accomplishment and requires constant vigilance and sometimes no matter how much attention you give something it still is not going to get done because the Peace Corps requires a large percentage of any project be contributed by the local community which can be slow in coming.

A ten minute walk from the school is the clinic which is the only health care facility for miles around.

There are four rooms in this clinic. One for paperwork, one for storage, one exam and treatment room for adults, and one for babies. You wouldn’t let them take your temperature in those rooms.

Just one example of Foreign Aid gone wrong – Japan sent over this high-tech refrigeration container for HIV drugs and it got sent to a place without electricity turning it into a massively expensive storage surface.

Back to Erin’s ‘we’ meaning they start the preparations for dinner that will be cooked on a small charcoal brazier.

You can see the two blue tubs on the dish drying rack on the right, and you can see the white bucket on the porch. Keep these two things in mind as you will learn more about life in the villages.

Part of the host family’s complex.

We took a short stroll to view another African sunset…

…and a cool moon rise. Looks great but it wipes out the stars.

We ate in the insaka and then I slept in a tent by the bathing enclosure and Mindy shared with Erin in the house.

Good morning!

This is the family’s garden.

One of the uncles works on the garden for a couple of hours each morning and carries water from the irrigation trench just between the garden and the open field.

The irrigation trench widens at one point and this is where Erin gets her water. Yes, she scoops up water out of that pond into the white bucket and carries it back to her hut.

She washes dishes, clothes, food, herself, in the water straight out of the bucket. For drinking she boils the water and then runs it through a ceramic filter.

Washing dishes is a Process. First you give the dishes to the dogs and the cat to clean up the big pieces. Then you put a little water in the two blue containers, one for the wash (and the water gets dirTY), and one for the rinse. Then you put the dishes on the rack, and then you put them away.

The Kundalila Falls, a National Monument.

This is the top of the falls and you can see that pool gathering waaay down there at the bottom. That’s where we’re going.

After breakfast we walked back to the school to meet a taxi we had arranged for from Serenje, to take us to Kundalila Falls.

Erin and Kaunda. Erin is finishing her two year commitment in two weeks and taking a third year project in another province.

She wanted to take Kaunda with her and start adoption proceedings which Kaunda’s mother, who lives in another province and hasn’t seen him in more than two years agrees to, but that is going to have to wait for a number of reasons not least that Kaunda is having second thoughts about leaving his village.

Another Peace Corps volunteer hired transport to bring all these folks to the falls and then…

…she jumped in! and then she got Kaunda, who doesn’t swim, to jump in with her!

How is it that I have these pictures? Because I punked out at the steep slippery part and didn’t complete the journey. I’m sure it was for the best!

On the way back we stopped here for a quick pic and my phone, which I’ve been using for entertainment (sudoku and flag games mostly) and to tell the time, slipped out onto the ground and some random guy picked it up and gave it back. He didn’t have to pick it up and he didn’t have to give it back. Lucky me!

We stopped because this is the raw material for nshima, the corn flour. A family of six would go through about one of these bags a month.

More roadside shopping.

And then back in Serenje to find volunteers ready to think about dinner.

To the right of the sitting area above we find this great table with the Peace Corps emblem that Mindy made. Very cool Mindy!

A few more shots of the hut.

Will had tricked out his hut fancy-dancy and greatly impressed Mindy.

He built a loft for his bed. The plastic sheeting is to keep the rubble from the roof from messing up his bed. You can’t use too much of the plastic sheeting though as the rats just love to live between the sheeting and the roof…

Volunteers are placed by themselves and each gets their own hut and their own pit toilet in a host family’s compound which is usually some distance from any neighbor. Together a number of these compounds make up a village.

The Cruiser – part of a fleet of Toyota Land Cruisers, with one at each Provincial House and a few in Lusaka. An essential part of Peace Corps service in Zambia is knowing where the Cruisers are and where they will be going next.

The Cruisers are dispatched for Peace Corps business so managing a ride with a Cruiser going your way instead of having to hitch hike or ride some packed bus is a great coup for a volunteer. This Site Visit was Peace Corps business and I was the one managing the ride!

One of the family members. Some of the buildings are round and some are rectangular. From what I can tell both shapes are used for all purposes.

August 6-8 Serenje

We left Lusaka in a Cruiser with these folks here, to drop off the new volunteers for their first Site Visit before formal training begins.

As in almost all of the Peace Corps volunteer sites in Zambia this place has no electricity and no running water. Will has been posted here for about 18 months now.

from left to right:
‘Bama, Valley Boy, Farm Girl, Mindy, Will, Hammy, Francis

A local school where they are considering placing a Peace Corps volunteer.

A common scene along the road.

Another common scene.

It’s burning season. Did I mention this in the section on Livingstone? I forget. It was burning season there too, where they burn the harvested fields, and that means Smoke. Between the dust and the smoke my allergies have been making themselves known but so far Claritin is working its magic.

At the Peace Corps house in Serenje, The Internet!

These guys were all volunteers in their sixth month of service staying at the house last night and off early in the morning. They stayed here to break their journey traveling down from the far north and heading into Lusaka for two weeks of training on the next phase of their service.

from the front, left to right:
Jess, Andrew
Shannon, Dre
Joe, Aniela, Musi Lisa
Richard