In Lusaka, Zambia.

Thursday 28 February 2008

I want to try and give you, the reader, an on the ground taste of what living, and training, is like in Lusaka, Zambia.

Morning is cool and full of cock-a-doodle-dos from the roosters next door. I grab a shirt, shorts and socks from the clothesline on the porch out front, slip on my runners, and start my morning run. By 6:15 AM the streets are already lined with Zambians going to work, or to school.

At the hostel there is a clean, well-tiled shower waiting for me when I return hot and sweaty. Breakfast is usually buns bought from a vendor nearby. To these we add mango jam and groundnut (peanut) butter, and order tea from the hostel kitchen. Breakfast is ate on the porch underneath the clothesline.

Our first session of the day is a language lesson from Brett Stevenson, co-Director of Southern Africa programs. She speaks functional Chichewa, and I don’t, so I pay close attention.

By noon we’ll have been through a session on value-chain analysis, or cross-cultural communication, and have received our marching orders for the afternoon. To give you an idea, today we were sent out on orders to gather information on the Zambian maize value chain, understand the key value chain interconnections, and return in time to draft a pair of interventions to improve the livelihoods of the maize market sellers of downtown Lusaka. It’s not a nice, neat assignment, but today we struck on a pair of good Zambian leads and had constructed a plan for a maize commodity exchange by suppertime.

Supper is nshima. It’s the staple food of Zambia: maize, milled to become “mealie-meal,” mixed with boiled water into a paste thicker and hotter than Thanksgiving mash potatoes. It’s served with a “relish,” which is a sauce and your choice of chicken, fish, beans, or anything else that might be on the menu. Grab it with your right hand, roll it in a ball, dip it in your relish, and dig in. Zambians eat it for breakfast, lunch and supper, but for this muzungu (white person), one meal of nshima fills me up for the entire day.

Once the sun sets, the mosquitoes come out, so spray profusely. We talk development, write blog entries, watch a football match over a beer at the bar, or just pack it in early.

At the end of the day, lying in bed under just a sheet, the question in my head is “just what on earth are we doing here?” But here is where we are, working side-by-side people we trust and admire, trying to solve tough problems, in a culture that’s full of warmth and hope. So instead I ask myself “why would we want to be anywhere else?”

It’s a pretty wonderful thing to live and work in south Africa. Even with the morning roosters.

En route à Montréal

(Written Tuesday 15 January)

From the back seat of a rental Chevrolet mini-van, in front of the soft glow of a dimmed laptop screen, listening to conversations of development murmured in the front seats and the undulating hum of highway beneath our wheels.

The EWB National Conference 2008 begins in Montreal tomorrow. As one of the eleven LTOV08s (Long-term Overseas Volunteer 2008) I’ll be part of a forward-looking meeting with other LTOV past and present, along with EWB management. The meeting begins at 9 AM tomorrow and there are still documents to review and responses to write before then.

Shea and Sarah are fast asleep in two of the four front bucket seats. Levi drives and talks with Russ, while Jeremy taps away on his MacBook next to me. It’s two more hours until midnight and we’re at least that far away from Montreal.

This is only the second day of my formal pre-departure training quarterbacked from downtown Toronto. Something struck me at 10 AM this morning while returning from a Tim Horton’s coffee break to our second morning session. Chatting with John-Paul, a chemical engineer employed only weeks ago with Syncrude the insight materialized: this training group is, for all intensive purposes, the most potent learning environment I’ve ever inhabited.

We are diverse, bright lights of thought illuminating issues from many different perspectives. We are passionate and interested and eager to make learning our business. It’s an open environment full of challenging questions, of probing, or thoughtfulness and reflection and even insight. When we return home at the end of the day we make a stop to pick up groceries to cook a house dinner, we clean-up together, we sip tea and talk and revisit with new questions and new angles all the issues we just spent hours trying to wrestle to the ground.

I think we’re almost in Kingston now. The highway is full of long-haul trucks carrying their payloads or empty trailers up and down the 401. Their red and amber running lights illuminate Russ’ face as we slip them by. The dim outlines of jagged rock walls can be made out just beyond the shoulder of the highway a sight seen in Jasper, but not on the plains of the Peace country, Edmonton or Calgary.

Today and here is a time and a place that it is good to live in, good to learn in.