Short: Happy 4th of July, Meet the German Family, Phone Sydney, Australia, from the fields, Relax, Meet the Peace Corp girls, Catch-up with Mark and Mel
Long: Happy 4th of July to my fellow Americans!!! Quite honestly, we didn’t do much today. We woke up late in the chalet, and not wanting to take advantage of Mark’s hospitality, moved to the campsites. Mark and Mel left early in the morning to do some shopping in the local town and the only other customers at the estate are a group of four Peace Corps volunteers (All girls!), and a German family that has also driven up from Cape Town. Naturally, Nikolai befriended the German contingent early in the day, and we learned that they were driving from Cape Town to Uganda over the four week long school holidays. The family would then return to Uganda over the next four week holiday in December to drive from Uganda to Germany. We give them a lot of credit – That is a difficult trip to make as a family. Stephan, the father, is from Germany, but living and working in Cape Town. He has asked us if we want to caravan up to the border the next day and we have agreed to go with them.
Early in the morning I managed to call a friend of mine in Australia from a wooden platform (seen below), setup on the estate. There I was standing on this bamboo platform, in the middle of northern Zambia, with villagers staring, discussing apartment options with Mark in Sydney.
The rest of the day we just lounged around the estate. As you can see from the pictures the place is beautiful, with the chalets and the campsites situated along a great river, and the Hot Springs are only a short distance away. Mark and Mel have a few dogs and a Springbok. Yes…a Springbok. They found “Percy,” alone, and barely able to walk, a few months back and have since nursed him to adolescence. He believes he is a dog, and in fact, sleeps with and plays with the other dogs. Nikolai, honing his fatherly instincts, even bottle fed him on the first evening.
That evening we sat in the Hot Springs chatting with the Peace Corp girls, toasted to the 4th in the states, and then headed to the main building to share a drink with Mark and Mel, who had finally returned from their trip into the city. We determined that the Peace Corp girls ranged in age from twenty-two to forty, and that their backgrounds varied tremendously from an LA school teacher to a nurse. We were very impressed with these four girls. They were given a few months of training and then dropped off in a local village for two years. They are given a hut in the village with no running water or electricity, and a mandate to work with the community on specific development issues, mainly health-related. They have been in northern Zambia for a few months now and already two of them have already contracted, and been successfully treated for, malaria.
As I said yesterday we had a few interesting discussions with Mark and Mel about Africa and development. Again, for the sake of brevity, I will summarize the most interesting below.
Firstly, a little background on Mark and Mel. Mark has lived in Zambia his entire life. He moved from Lusaka to the estate about fifteen years ago. Mel is from the U.K., and we suspect she moved to Zambia within the past fifteen years as well. Interestingly we mentioned our time spent with Sipho in Lusaka, and his comment was, “Yes, of course I know Sipho, everyone knows Sipho”. This short conversation exposed to us the small social circle that must exist among the wealthier population in Zambia.
It was clear to us from the first night that Mark is passionate about Zambian development issues. On one side he is truly interested in bringing the communities up, and on the other side noticeably frustrated at the inability to do so. He has self-funded many projects in the community with varying degrees of success, and in some cases failure. He is a true believer that those giving aid must be on the ground to learn from the realities of the continent. He believes that over the last few decades many local people have stopped thinking for themselves; and have begun relying on aid. At one point he commented, “All the AID groups need to leave, and this will force people to think for themselves”. We discussed how road construction is funded (In many cases a foreign countries will fund the road construction and hire their own countries company to build – The aid comes into the country and flows back out – but leaves the country with a new road), but not the ability to maintain the road. He believes less direct AID will force people to begin thinking differently.
We discussed how easily NGO’s can fail because they do not understand the priorities of the local community. He offered his own failure as an example: “Mel and I funded to have each villager on our estate to be supplied with a mosquito net. As you know Malaria is a huge issue in this area. We taught them how to use the nets, and in many cases outfitted entire families. A few weeks later we returned to the village to find that most of the nets were in the streams being used to catch fish.” After years of not using nets, villagers found it more useful to use them to find their next meal, not to avoid catching malaria. One of the more interesting conversations was about the “Jealousy factor”. Mark explained that one of the major reasons communities do not advance is because when one person from the community betters themselves, the rest of the community becomes jealous and destroys his or her advantage. He mentioned how he began a program that assisted community members in selecting crops to plant, and getting them to appropriate markets. If villagers followed the program they could increase their income dramatically. One of the villagers successfully followed the program, only to walk into his fields one morning to find other villagers had let their livestock graze there the night before, destroying his harvest. He eventually moved out of the village.
Nikolai and I mentioned that we thought a mini-golf franchise could be a great way for villagers to make some money and thwart boredom. We weren’t kidding. Mark just laughed and commented that “in the first few days the flags would be stolen, the balls used for something else, and the clubs used in domestic assaults”. He said it could work, but creativity would be needed…anything is possible, just extremely difficult given the strong culture. It is becoming increasingly clear to Niki and I why development in Zambia, and Africa in general, can be made so difficult. Lastly, we learned that, at least in Zambia, the women run the show. We saw this on the road to Shiwa. Most of the men just sit around while the women walk kilometers to pickup food and water. We were told that in the villages many of the women are the hardest workers, and the most accomplished entrepreneurs. We will have to note whether this is the same in other countries. Between Mark, Mel, and the Peace Corp volunteers we learned a lot this evening. We are planning to leave early in the morning for the border with Tanzania - the German family right behind us.
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