"Doing" (international) development

Talking with my in-country coach, Thulasy, while I’ve been doing my two- (now three-) week stint in Lusaka, I was telling her about how I wanted to get back to the village and leave the OPPAZ office in the city where I was working a 9-to-5, working on reports that analyzed the data that I had collected in the village. I made the comment to her that it didn’t feel like I was “doing development,” since I could be in any office in any country doing what I was doing – I didn’t need to be in Africa if I was limited to the office all the time. That is where the attachment to the village and to the field is so important. It ties back in to Dorothy and to building and maintaining that connection to those who we actually are doing this for. Those people are real. And far from being helpless and dependent on aid, the life that they create with such little means is what truly inspires me.

Every day in the village I spent my time talking with women who quite literally run out of food and money for three or four months of the year. How do they and their families survive? Some get by on one meal a day. Some manage to find some limited low-paid piecework for some of the better-off farmers, in order to buy enough food for – again – a meal a day. Some get small loans from people within the community to buy food. Some live off of the charity of others who perhaps had a better harvest than they did. Somehow they get by – malnourished, hungry – but they survive. This is not few and far between. This is by and large the norm for the people in the villages in that area, and I would wager that it is true for the villages all over Zambia, and all over Africa. It seemed that no matter the variation in production amounts from their crops, most families felt the pinch of no food and no money during those last few months before crops were harvested.

These women and their families live close to the earth, tied to the earth. Their livelihoods depend on it, through what it yields to them in crops. Their houses are made of it, round walls built of poles, packed with mud, and crowned with thatch. They warm themselves and their food with it, burning charcoal or wood in fires. They complete all of their daily activities in it, for it is everywhere: floors are of dirt, maize and groundnuts are shelled while sitting on the ground, dishes are polished using the sandy earth, children romp and play amongst it, clothes and skin are covered in it, the wind whips and boils it up into dust storms that coat and spray everything. When I think of these people, I think of the earth, and how they make life in such conditions seem normal.

Should they be normal? What is it that should be changed, or improved? Obviously, people need to have food and money year-round. Water, health – also important. But should we be striving for every family to have cement or brick houses with iron sheet roofs? Should we be pushing for electricity to come to the area (30km off the road), for every family to collect electronics and furniture and gadgets to make life easy and comfortable? Is that progress? I can’t see it here. There are things that are more important.

To be continued…

My role in the village

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.

Pre-village update

I tried to upload a video here - it loaded for about 6 hours and crapped out at the end anyway. So, no go.

Otherwise, I have been able to upload lots of pictures on the flickr website (see post below for link) while I worked over the last few days (it also takes hours), and have now maxed out my space there, so make sure you check those out.

At this point, I'm not sure how many blog entries I will be able to post before I leave the city. If not, it will be mid-August when I return to Lusaka and the office (and the internet).

One more thing...

So, how about some emails? There is nothing better to fill my heart with warmth when I am very far away and lonely and confused than emails from home. Of course I have had constant contact with Kent, and a few emails and comments from some people - thank you! I love you for it! - but I would sure love to hear from more of you. Any length, even just a hello, or a comment on the pictures or the blog posts, or especially any stories from home, what you have been doing, daily routines - you just don't realize how much it brings me home and makes me feel normal to hear from you and what everyone is doing. So please, send me stuff at cherie.ratte@gmail.com but do it this weekend, since I only have internet access until Thursday!

Thanks!

See more pictures on my flickr.com space

Just a quick note to say that I have been uploading more pictures on flickr.com since it is slow and painstaking to include them in my blog. You can check them out on www.flickr.com, and under "People" search for Starring Cherie in the role of Albino Baboon.

Or go here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/28474150@N07/ if it works.

Love you.

Purple people and albino baby baboons

Composing these blogs is more difficult than I expected it would be. Not only is time a factor – being very busy with work and having been away for the last five days at our mid-summer retreat and conference with the rest of the team here in Zambia – but figuring out exactly what I want to say takes a great deal of thought and reflection. Every time I think I know what I want to address, I end up changing it or scrapping it. There are so many aspects, so many angles, and so many experiences that just can’t be captured in mere words or pictures, so I struggle to best communicate what I am thinking, feeling, and encountering.

The best way to try to put you, the reader, into my headspace is with some sort of analogy. “Cultural integration” is the big buzzword/buzzphrase, but it goes way beyond eating what the locals eat, picking up key phrases in the local language(s) (Zambia has over 70), and even living within communities, within local families. Never being able to become one of the locals is a drastic understatement, and I hope the following analogy and story can help you to understand the constant intense focus that I (and the other overseas volunteers) feel when over here.

My analogy involves purple people from outer space. Yes. Bear with me. So imagine that a new species come to our planet, and that they look pretty much like humans in every way but they have bright purple skin. They even act like us – mostly. But many rumours fly around about the abilities that they have, superior intelligence, what-have-you, and of course the advanced technology – I mean, look at the sleek spaceships they arrived in! There are not many of them here on Earth, just a few here and there who are living and working among us to see how we can mutually benefit from trade deals and such. They speak only a little bit of English, otherwise their own language is unintelligible to us. Some of them attempt to mingle with us humans, but by and large outside of work situations they keep to themselves. Otherwise, they seem friendly enough.

So put yourself into this scenario, with these strange but interesting beings here and there among us. How do we react to them? How do we see them?

If you’re honest with yourself, you’d be downright excited to see one and to be able to talk to one and see what they’re like. Everyone is talking about them. If you see one walking down the street, aren’t you going to stare? I mean, they have purple skin!! And even if it’s not meant maliciously, you still have to look – you’ve never seen anything like it before. It is a weird mix of exotic zoo animal/movie star fascination. You don’t really know what they’re like, but you have heard so many things about them. Someone said they could fly! Someone else said that they have come to take over, so we should be careful. You also heard that they have so many amazing gadgets that they carry with them – a shrinking ray (wow!), a transporter (can you believe it!), a food materializer - wouldn’t you love to see those things, OR even try them??!

But you also heard that they eat through their noses – you just gotta see that. And that when they sleep, they peel a new layer of skin at night. You’re just not sure, so you might be a little intimidated of them when they do say hello.
But if you were to be able to talk to a purple person, you would find that they do not have any special powers, and that they do not want to be singled out. In fact, they are quite shy, and when given so much attention, they feel targeted. Because they can’t speak English very well they are not able to talk to humans much, except for the few who they have trained in their special purple language. As a result, they remain misunderstood.

Okay, before I lose myself too much in this scenario, I think you have figured it out. Here in Africa, us whites are the purple people. This is especially true in the villages where there are never any whites, like in Chileka village and area where I stayed for a month. I was the only muzungu (white person) that had ever stayed there, so the majority of people had never seen one before, and definitely never interacted with one. This would be why I continually got comments like “now I can say that I’ve eaten a meal with a white person!” or why people would get SO excited if they shook my hand (in fact, people would line up in great crowds to shake my hand sometimes). Every place I went, any time I was outside of my house, even sitting in the front area or ANYWHERE, everyone stared at me. Everyone. And Africans don’t use a smile as a greeting, or even respond to smiles, so having dozens and dozens of cold-faced intense stares meet me 24/7 can get pretty weary. On the other hand, as soon as I opened it up with a “muli bwanji!” (hi, how are you), the faces would break into a large grin and a warm friendly “bwino!” (fine). Not only were people excited to talk to me – she actually IS friendly – but speaking in their own language, now that was the cat’s ass!

The reason I talk about this stuff is because although it may seem trivial or even anticipated, it has an effect on my mental and emotional health, and on everything I do. To constantly be the centre of attention, for better or for worse, can be very draining. Like I said: zoo animal, movie star, physical deformity; even if the attention is just simple curiosity, you have no privacy, no peace at any time. You can try to ignore it, you can try to change the reference through positive interaction, but you can never make it go away. You never become “normal.”

I think what really helped me to accept that attention was something that happened when I was on safari. Lots of baboons everywhere, but one day we saw a group of baboons with babies – you gotta love the babies! We were busy oohing and aahing over all the babies, and then we spied an albino baby! Wow! How often does that happen?! Suddenly, all of our attention was on the albino baby; all of the other baboons and babies forgotten. All of our pictures were of the albino baby as well. Then it hit me – why were we so drawn to that one? Because she was different? Because she was rare? She didn’t ask to be born albino, nor did she ask for all the special attention. She was just hanging onto her momma and doing the same things as the rest of the babies. That little albino baby baboon was a reflection of me here in Zambia. I could no more blame the locals for their fascination with me than I could blame us and our fascination with that albino.

The next time you wonder about it, consider a day in the life of someone with a serious facial disfigurement and the kind of attention that receives. I may be feeling this intense pressure here, but I will eventually go home to where my comfort level will return to normal (in terms of race majority, anyway). Others do not have that advantage, and must deal with that stress of tactless staring throughout their entire lives.

Tales from the village (and the safari park!)

Hello everyone! I am back in the city and have (limited) access to the internet (if only I could get my laptop to connect!). I had an amazing time in the village for the last month, met some absolutely incredible people and did not want to leave. I have many stories and reflections to share, and some awesome pictures of some truly inspiring people who have almost nothing but enormous hearts. Also, in between leaving the village and returning to the city I took a few days and visited the South Luangwa national park (look it up!) to do some safaris and game (wildlife) drives - all I can say is, wow. Again, I have tons of stories and hundreds of pictures that I will post as soon as possible. So I'll get writing and start posting within the next few days. In the meantime - Mel: you can tell Hannah that YES I've seen giraffes, AND zebras, AND hippos, AND crocodiles, AND leopards, AND LIONS - all at just a few metres away from our open-air safari jeep! What an experience. These teaser pics were taken with my crappy camera - THAT'S how close I was!

For now, musale bwino (stay well). My love to you all - especially to K and the boys. xoxox