Mwaipoleni Mwakwi (Hello),
Hope all is well for everyone in the states. I’ve had about a solid month of the village life, and I’ve really started making some headway in the community. Fish Farming is going well, and I’ve gotten 3 Fish Farming groups together, each of whom I am teaching once per week. I am also teaching Fish Farming at a local Government School one day per week – which puts me at 4 days each week of teaching. I am very lucky to have such interest in the community – most volunteers struggle to keep busy and find work, so I am definitely blessed. The remaining days in the week are kept full by making pond site visits to individual farmers within the groups, and the secondary projects I’ll describe below. Also, my relationship with my Bemba family is very good, so I’m grateful for that as well.
I’m also trying to set up a school correspondence program between a school in the states and the school in Musa at which I’m teaching. Basically it will involve letters sent back and forth between students describing their lives, educations, etc. I am even going to try to get some pictures sent from America, and take some pictures of the school here with my digital camera. The juxtaposition of these two cultures is definitely hard to grasp even through letters, but with the pictures this correspondence should at least raise awareness among the American students about how lucky they are to have quality educators and facilities. The schools here lack power, running water, and often proper educators.
The other project I’ve been working with was inherited from another Volunteer. She just left for America, and she had been doing some great work with the Basic School in my community (Chibo). Basically, as a community school they receive no funding except what comes from the parents of the community – which is often nothing. Also, the teachers aren’t even getting paid currently. In order to solve this, Sarah (the outgoing volunteer) created a chicken coupe project, in which the school rears chicks and then sells them for meat. It is actually quite profitable as long as chick mortality rates remain low. For my part, being business oriented, I have been focusing on finding a sustainable market for the chickens. We had a major breakthrough this weekend with a philanthropic entrepreneur in Kasama who is willing to help finance an expansion of the chicken coupe project and be a consistent customer. We will basically be contracted by him to sell 200 chickens each month. This is a promising development, and while I was the one to meet this gentleman and line up the business transactions, the Chairman of the project (also my host brother) has established a relationship with the entrepreneur, so that they can continue their association after I depart, and hopefully soon without any correspondence from myself (Sustainability).
We have recently had a major setback in the fish farming project however. My host father and model farmer, one who is helping spread fish farming in the area, had a serious problem on Wednesday. He has 7 ponds, but one of them consists of about half of his fish – its basically a lake, 50 meters by 50 meters. I was working on the chicken coupe project when we got word from a worker on the farm that the biggest pond had ‘broken’. We hustled down to find a huge chasm on the southwest corner – a river of water rushing through. Dumbfounded, I just stood in shock for about 10 seconds. As I gathered myself I ordered the worker to get the fish net, to stop the fish from escaping into the dambo (field) beyond the fishpond. Once the net was in place, all we could really do was watch mother nature’s destructive forces at work. The pond was over my head in many places, which means that millions of gallons of water were pouring into the dambo. It took more than 2 hours for all the water to finish emptying, and we stood helplessly watching.
We rescued what fish we could – the ones swept by the current into the Dambo. We were lucky on 2 points: the crack in the pond (about 2 meters wide) forced the water into another pond, and then the overflow rushed into the dambo – the fish are afraid of running water and therefore most remained in the second pond; and no one was at the pond when the wall burst – the force of the water would have meant almost certain death.
My host father was in shock. He was asking his lord how such destruction could happen, and was speaking very bleakly and sounded extremely downtrodden – almost hopeless. I tried to keep a positive attitude and make productive actions – hiding (or attempting to) my own similar feelings. Once the pond had angrily thrown itself into the Dambo, he calmed in the aftermath. Still, his reaction was appropriate considering this pond holds about half of his fish stock. The best analogy I can make to America is this: imagine if you owned a business, and it lost half of its value overnight! Fish farming is his business and livelihood, so this was just short of catastrophic for him - almost for me also. If he had given up hope on fish farming, all of the momentum we’ve been gaining in the community and basically my entire Peace Corps program would have been in jeopardy.
Luckily, the positive and resilient attitude that first impressed me about this culture held true again. My host father is now back at work, and his attitude is incredibly optimistic. The next day we headed to the government offices to get what help we could, and we started repairing the ponds yesterday. His positive attitude and relentlessness is a blessing in a country in which many are just looking for handouts.
There is a lot of work ahead – this is my first real challenge in Peace Corps service (other than adjustment). More than for myself of the community, I hope I can come through for my host father. It was like watching his dreams, plans, and aspirations flood over the dambo and disappear. I find myself eager to help my best friend in Zambia - a 67-year-old Fish Farmer whom I’ve known less than 6 months. Only PC could have given me such an opportunity to challenge my life perspective. We have no choice but to complete this work and keep moving. In the words of my host father, “This has happened and there is nothing we can do besides keep trying”.
All my best, and I promise pictures as soon as possible.
- Hos
