An unexpected delay of transport (read: the bus for which I had bought a ticket to go to Kasama today broke down so wouldn’t be running until Monday, and all the other buses this morning had already left, so I am stuck waiting another day in Lusaka) has allowed me to put together a blog post or two, since I didn’t have the time before, and had really wanted to. See, things happen for a reason.
I realize I haven’t told anything of my time in the village, and I have two veins to talk about: what I saw/did/experienced, and what it made me feel and think about. I’ll start this post with the goings-on during my time in Chileka village.
So I went to work specifically with a small group of women farmers who form a collective known as Tigwirizane (tig-weer-i-za-ney) Women’s Club, meaning “to work together.” The group is a member of the Zambian organization OPPAZ that I am partnered with here. My role in coming to Chileka was to do a baseline survey – basically conduct interviews with a number of the Tigwirizane members about their living conditions, their farming methods, incomes, how much and what crops they produce, and the amount that is marketed versus home consumption. The idea is that by taking a “snapshot” of such things now, and then doing the same thing again in a few years following training workshops and organic certification that will lead to bigger and better markets (theoretically), we can measure how much impact there has been on the community – that big buzzword of international development. Basically, we want to see how much the community has improved because of assistance from the outside, in this case, OPPAZ.
So in Chileka I was set up with a translator, Jonathan Chiwawa, the 23 y.o. son of the principal of the community school. He has graduated from high school but he needs to rewrite some exams in order to continue his studies for a trade; in the meantime he works on house jobs and on the farmwork, but his passion is his dance and drum performance group, which combines entertainment with community messages and teachings, like was done here for Child Health Week when their songs and their skits were about hygiene and related subjects. Mr. Chiwawa, the principal, acted as a sort of coordinator for OPPAZ and had helped set up my placement in the community, and Mrs. Chiwawa was the secretary for the Tigwirizane group and a powerful member of the community. Although I wasn’t staying with them, I became very close with the family and spent much of my time with them in their fields or at their home.
Every day we would visit the homes of women in the group to interview them. Picking our way through a maze of identical mud thatch houses, we would find the one we had selected by lottery, and she would stop doing whatever it was that she had been doing – usually shelling dried maize or groundnuts (peanuts) – offer me the only stool or sling chair that they owned, and pull out a mat to sit on. The women were always so excited for me to visit and talk – even if through a translator, although they just LOVED it when I pulled out my handful of Nyanja, the local language. They all believed that my coming there was the solution to all their problems, that I could make the poverty go away, no matter how much Jonathan and I explained what my project was about. Nonetheless, everyone was so cheerful and so giving; I would leave almost every interview with a gift of some kind, be it groundnuts, beans, melons, and sometimes even meat.
Yes, these are the same people that go without full meals every day. Yet I cannot refuse; to do so would be completely rude and insulting. So I would take a big gulp and offer as many thank yous as I could, hoping to convey how very much I appreciated and admired their generosity.
I realize I haven’t told anything of my time in the village, and I have two veins to talk about: what I saw/did/experienced, and what it made me feel and think about. I’ll start this post with the goings-on during my time in Chileka village.
So I went to work specifically with a small group of women farmers who form a collective known as Tigwirizane (tig-weer-i-za-ney) Women’s Club, meaning “to work together.” The group is a member of the Zambian organization OPPAZ that I am partnered with here. My role in coming to Chileka was to do a baseline survey – basically conduct interviews with a number of the Tigwirizane members about their living conditions, their farming methods, incomes, how much and what crops they produce, and the amount that is marketed versus home consumption. The idea is that by taking a “snapshot” of such things now, and then doing the same thing again in a few years following training workshops and organic certification that will lead to bigger and better markets (theoretically), we can measure how much impact there has been on the community – that big buzzword of international development. Basically, we want to see how much the community has improved because of assistance from the outside, in this case, OPPAZ.
So in Chileka I was set up with a translator, Jonathan Chiwawa, the 23 y.o. son of the principal of the community school. He has graduated from high school but he needs to rewrite some exams in order to continue his studies for a trade; in the meantime he works on house jobs and on the farmwork, but his passion is his dance and drum performance group, which combines entertainment with community messages and teachings, like was done here for Child Health Week when their songs and their skits were about hygiene and related subjects. Mr. Chiwawa, the principal, acted as a sort of coordinator for OPPAZ and had helped set up my placement in the community, and Mrs. Chiwawa was the secretary for the Tigwirizane group and a powerful member of the community. Although I wasn’t staying with them, I became very close with the family and spent much of my time with them in their fields or at their home.Every day we would visit the homes of women in the group to interview them. Picking our way through a maze of identical mud thatch houses, we would find the one we had selected by lottery, and she would stop doing whatever it was that she had been doing – usually shelling dried maize or groundnuts (peanuts) – offer me the only stool or sling chair that they owned, and pull out a mat to sit on. The women were always so excited for me to visit and talk – even if through a translator, although they just LOVED it when I pulled out my handful of Nyanja, the local language. They all believed that my coming there was the solution to all their problems, that I could make the poverty go away, no matter how much Jonathan and I explained what my project was about. Nonetheless, everyone was so cheerful and so giving; I would leave almost every interview with a gift of some kind, be it groundnuts, beans, melons, and sometimes even meat.
Yes, these are the same people that go without full meals every day. Yet I cannot refuse; to do so would be completely rude and insulting. So I would take a big gulp and offer as many thank yous as I could, hoping to convey how very much I appreciated and admired their generosity.
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