Western Province, Day 1

Sunday, September 7th We left the Embassy at about 10:30am in a motorcade of 3 SUVs. I’ve always thought the SUVs that the U.S. government owns here were a bit unnecessary, but I would soon find out on this trip how wrong I was. Our delegation consisted of (I’m listing because they all come into the story later on):

- Myself
- Lungowe, monitoring & evaluation specialist for CDC
- Chris, chief public affairs officer at the Embassy
- Mark, public affairs assistant
- James, resident legal advisor
- George, political assistant
- Ali, Norman, and Killion, Embassy drivers
- Elizabeth, who met us at our first stop, and who manages the CDC office in Western Province

Chris, James, and I are American, while the rest of the group is Zambian. Lungowe and George are both from the Western Province, and are members of the Lozi tribe from that area. As you’ll see later, it proved to be a huge help and a lot of fun to have the two of them along.

The drive to our first stop took about 4½ hours, but it was a really nice drive. The road between Lusaka and Western Province is paved and in good shape, and it took us first out through an industrial area of Lusaka before moving into a stretch of small shops, schools, and grass and mud huts of families that live outside the city. After about 45 minutes or so, we moved into more rural areas and only saw huts every couple of kilometers.

After a couple hours, we entered Kafue National Park, one of the larger public game reserves in Zambia. During the 90 minute drive through Kafue, we saw a number of animals near the road, including several types of antelope (kudu and reedbuck I think, I’m not that good at telling them apart), warthogs (the babies were hilarious), some small monkeys. We didn’t see any elephants, who do sometimes wander close to the road, and no lions or leopards as they usually stay far away. I did see one zebra on the way back.

After leaving the park and finishing our drive, we arrived in the town of Kaoma and checked into the Cheshire Home Lodge. I don’t have many good things to say about this place, but it basically consisted of 7 free-standing “chalets” that each contained a bedroom and bathroom area. There were also a few rooms in a larger building, but they weren’t “self-contained,” meaning they had shared bathrooms. There are some photos of my chalet here, and the photo to the left is of a hilarious notice on the wall in each chalet. There was a big bucket of fresh (I hope) water in my bathroom, and as the running water didn’t seem to work I assumed I had to use it to bathe and fill my toilet to flush, etc. I found out later that we had to ask the staff to turn the water on when we wanted to use it, so I did have some semblance of a shower the next morning.

The chalet didn’t seem all that clean either, so I slept in my clothes on top of the bedding as recommended by Chris. I also slept under a bednet for the first time, as I don’t have one here at home (yet) and the mosquitoes are only starting to come out as the weather has warmed up lately. Better safe than sorry when out in the more rural areas though, as malaria is much more of a problem there than in Lusaka; I’m on malaria prophylaxis, but didn’t want to take any chances.

After we checked in, we left to drive to our first scheduled event, a meeting with a farm cooperative that received a small grant from us for shared farm equipment. We met a couple members of the coop at the gas station in town, then drove about 30 minutes down a few dirt roads and one winding path through brush to get to the home of the coop’s head. I started to appreciate having the SUVs at this point.

The visit was really interesting. We met the Chairperson of the Kaoma Agri-Class Coop Society, who is a 70-ish year old man named Kenneth, his Publicity Secretary, and a few of his younger colleagues.

I should pause here for a note: I am finding it hard to use the right terms to describe what we saw, because as I re-read the description of the coop that was in my briefing packet, and if I read those names and titles I listed above, I would imagine a more sophisticated, or at least formal and developed, organization. The members of the coop we met were clearly intelligent, dedicated, and savvy (they had successfully gotten a grant from the U.S. mission, after all), no doubt. But I don’t want to leave the impression that this is anything other than the most rural farming organization in the poorest and least developed part of Zambia.

They have no electricity or communications equipment aside from a couple cell phones, and the only farming equipment consists of hoes and other hand tools, oxen, plow, and carts. They used the $7,000 grant we gave them in 2005-06 to purchase said oxen and plow, and they share them among the 17 members of the coop, who each have small parcels of land near their homes. The coop additionally owns a few hectares of communal land they all share. I didn’t ask, but from what I saw it seems that they rely on the rainy season and water from their wells to nourish the crops, and a little manure to fertilize. That’s it. Their crops are planted haphazardly to work around the brush and dry, rocky terrain, and they have to be creative and use makeshift fences and other barriers to keep animals from eating the crops.

They grow corn, ground nuts (peanuts), millet, sorghum, and cassava (that Wiki entry says that nshima can be made with cassava; I don't doubt that's true, but in Zambia some folks make their nshima with both corn AND cassava, but I don't think with cassava alone). Their techniques are rudimentary, and from Kenneth’s description it sounds like they can’t really afford to leave their fields fallow, so they rotate crops and do the best they can. Kenneth’s English wasn’t very good, but I think he said that the cassava helps rejuvenate the earth when they plant it for a cycle. They also have to make the most out of the small fertile plots they have, and they plant rows of cassava in between the rows of corn. They feed their families with the crops, and try to market the excess in Kaoma to bring in a small amount of income. They also, like many people in the area, had a small group of cattle that they kept nearby for meat and sale, as well as goats and chickens running around Kenneth’s property.

After we toured their fields, we went back to Kenneth’s house for a short meeting. Kenneth’s homestead, like nearly every one we would see all week, consisted of 3-4 1-room grass huts with thatched roofs and dirt floors. Immediately inside the doorway (covered with cloth, no door), Kenneth and his wife had a small circle of wooden chairs set out into a sitting area. He had a tilting bookshelf and some plastic milk/soda crates stacked up on the back side of the sitting area, and some frayed tapestries hanging from the ceiling to separate this front area from the cooking area in the back. There was no lighting, so it was very dark even though it was light outside. There were huge bugs flying everywhere, and everything was in very shabby, worn, dusty condition. Kenneth’s wife joined us as we sat and talked.

It was shocking and humbling to be invited into his home, even though I did have some sense of what to expect beforehand. Later during the week I had the same thoughts running through my head as I saw the homes, schools, and clinics we visited: Is this really where they live? Is this really how they live? This is all they have? Those aren’t very useful thoughts or emotions, as everyone we met was very proud of what they had while acknowledging their struggles, but nonetheless that’s what came to me each time. It’s one thing to read and think about the lives of the poor in less-developed nations, but it’s another to see it firsthand and to realize that regardless of the poverty and conditions you’ve seen in your life before, it’s staggering to think that this is how almost everyone lives in these areas. We have people who live in this level of poverty in the U.S. and other places I’ve traveled, but it’s the sheer scale and scope here that really blows me away. As we drove around the province all week, we saw probably thousands of homesteads similar to Kenneth’s, and the statistics become a bit more real. Average family income in Zambia is $900 a year. The rich upper-class is miniscule, and there really isn’t a middle class. It’s just overwhelming to even try to imagine how all the world’s development efforts could even scratch the surface here.

And keep in mind, Kenneth is probably the closest thing to lower-middle class this area has. As the leader of the coop, he decides how to distribute use of the shared equipment, land distribution, marketing strategy for their production, and other issues. He also takes care of his own family, and has at least a couple of sons and several grandchildren, who kept poking their heads through the windows to look at us (no glass, of course). During the meeting in his house, he and his colleagues described to us how our grant had helped them to triple their average maize production over the last 2 years, but also noted that the rains last year had washed out most of their corn crop and they’ve had to try to squeeze more out of their other crops to make ends meet. They said the savings resulting from the equipment purchase allowed some coop members to pay for school fees for their children and additional seed and manure. They described their farming and marketing methods and the transport troubles they have getting their crops to market in Kaoma (also using ox and cart) during the rainy season when the roads are nearly impassable.

The photo at the right is one of the children in Kenneth's extended family; the group of kids in the photo above are also. We also learned that Kenneth had actually been to the U.S. in the late 60’s to study at the University of Pennsylvania, and he had some photos of himself from that trip displayed prominently in the house. Kenneth was also apparently a journalist and a bit of a politico, and served as the Zambian ambassador to Kenya under the Kenneth Kaunda (KK) government. Chris asked him about politics and about what the next Zambian government’s priorities should be, and he answered without missing a beat: food security, transportation infrastructure, and health. Throughout our visit, he repeatedly described how (loyalist to the end) things were better under the KK government and that his people have struggled since.

I was especially fascinated to hear about his past, but I wasn’t really sure what to draw from it; does this mean that he left a potentially more lucrative and higher-society career and life in government to return voluntarily to farming and involvement in his family and community? Or was he unable to continue on that path after the KK government fell? I don’t know if he was in the U.S. for a bachelor’s degree or just shorter-term training, but in Zambia in the 60’s, a U.S.-educated man would certainly be on the fast-track to the upper-class. I didn’t get any more information to answer those questions, but wished I had more time to hear his life story.

We finished our visit with a prayer (requested by Kenneth), and by signing his visitor’s book. Visitor’s books are apparently a tradition in Zambia (or at least Western Province), because we signed them at every single event all week, which became a running joke among the delegation. We brought small gifts to each event, including Embassy publications and educational materials, posters, and some nicer gifts for certain higher-level officials. In addition, Chris brought a box full of hundreds of cheap plastic pens with the U.S. flag and Embassy website; I thought they were a corny and lame thing to hand out, but people loved them. The joke though, was that they didn’t work very well, and every time we tried to use them to sign a visitor’s book it would take twice as long to write anything because the ink didn’t flow well, while the rest of us sat there and tried to keep a straight face.

We left amid well-wishes and repeated requests from Kenneth that we not forget about them, and expressions of hope for future support. This would prove to be the most common, and most difficult, thing we would hear at every stop all week. As I said before, the people we met were without exception extremely proud of what they have and what they’ve accomplished. But they also, without exception, asked us repeatedly for more help and support. Some requests were specific, some were vague, but the commonality was that they asked us multiple times during each visit. They weren’t trying to guilt-trip us, but at least for me that’s what my guilty conscience felt. It was very difficult to look them in the eye and not make any pledges or promises, but that’s what we had to do. I got sad and angry several times during the week, but more on that later…

After leaving Kenneth’s place, we stopped at our lodge quickly, and then went into the center of Kaoma for dinner. Dinner ended up being a highly comic affair, as the restaurant was on Africa time to an extreme. We sat at plastic tables outside the restaurant, which was really nice. The menu was simple and simply Zambian: T-bone, bream (a local river fish), “village” chicken (described as “free-range,” hilarious since we had seen plenty of chicken in town grazing and picking through unappetizing things), some other kind of chicken (I couldn’t understand the difference despite repeated attempts to explain by the Zambians), or beef stew. All with nshima, of course. The T-bone seemed the safest choice, so the wussy Americans all ordered it.

The food came sporadically, with a couple dishes coming in 15 minutes, and a couple 15 minutes after that, and the rest (including all the T-bones) coming about an hour after that. After several obligatory jokes about the staff killing the cows and milling the corn out back, and after checking in with them several times and being told “5 more minutes” each time, we finally got our steaks. Zambians don’t really do anything less than well-well-done for some reason, so the T-bones were basically leather, but they were well-brined so it was tasty leather at least. The nshima was good and since we were all in a good mood we had a fun time, and I started to get to know some of the folks from our delegation a little better.

Then back to the nasty-rific Cheshire Home Lodge for a short sleep. The photo to the right is my bed with net down. We were up at 5 the next morning and on our way, but more on that next time.

Sorry for such a long post, but hopefully since I wrote at length about a few broader themes here I can gloss more quickly over the background in subsequent posts…