Mpongwe

Hi Everyone,

I can't believe it's been three weeks since I've last posted. It feels like no time has passed at all. Since I'm in Ndola (the second largest city in Zambia) to sort out some immigration stuff, this is a great opportunity to provide everyone reading this blog with a bit of an update, so here it goes.

Life in Thatch

As I think I've mentioned, I am now living in Mpongwe. Mpongwe isn't so much a town as it is one paved road lined with small shops, bars, and restaurants. However, Mpongwe isn't pretending to be a town, it's actually a large rural district of the Copperbelt Province. Where I'm living is about a 15 minute walk down a dirt road from the central shopping area.

Describing who my host family is can be a little tricky. Currently my "host" is Elias Mutwale, who is also one of my coworkers. However, I believe my actual rent agreement is with his mother. Elias lives in a mud brick, thatched roof hut with his wife Ethel and his wife's younger sister Bertha. I live in a similar hut about 20m from Elias. I have the hut to myself during the day, but am joined nightly by Elias's brother Darrius who lives at his mother's concrete block house accross the street but sleeps at mine. I eat my meals in Elias's hut and Darrius eats in his mother's. It's a little confusing but seems to work well enough.

My house in the foreground, Elias's in the backround.

Work

As I have mentioned previously, my official Engineers Without Borders (EWB) placement is with the Organic Producers and Processors Association of Zambia (OPPAZ). OPPAZ is an umbrella organization which facilitates market linkages and provides technical support to organic farming cooperatives and commercial organic farmers throughout Zambia. As part of their "technical support" services, OPPAZ has seconded me to the Mpongwe Organics Cooperative Society for the duration of my placement. This is how I have found myself where I am currently living.

Cooperatives are a way for small scale farmers to band together in order to have more strength in the market. They allow farmers to purchase farming inputs in bulk, share training, resources, and knowledge, and sell their produce as a group in order to be able to secure a better price and consolidate transportation costs.

In the case of the cooperative I am working with, they are promoting organic farming. The benefits of organic farming in the Zambian context are, theoretically, many. Fertilizer and pesticides are expensive, and serve to reduce the long-term fertility of the land. Organic farming allows farmers to farm without inputs (saving money), and maintain the long-term soil fertility of their land. This allows farmers to be more self-reliant, and provides them with improved livelihood sustainability.

However, organic farming has its challenges. It is a lot more complicated, and requires a lot more labour than conventional farming. Farmers, who, in my brief experience, tend to put a high discount rate on the future as compared with the present, sometimes find it hard to change over to organic farming based on sustainability reasons alone. Conventional farming is already very hard work, and so it's difficult for many people to commit to working even harder without additional compensation.

The Cooperative is working in many ways to confront these challenges. On the issue of technique, with the support of OPPAZ, the Cooperative provides their members with extensive training and support in order to facilitate best practice organic farming. As for the more difficult issue of farmer compensation, the Cooperative's main role is to link farmers with export markets in Europe.

In European countries, organic produce now commands a premium over conventional produce. This means that small scale farmers in Zambia, by farming organically, can in theory sell their produce in bulk to the European market for prices far exceeding what they can usually obtain domestically. Hello, organic farming incentive!

In the past the cooperative has met with mixed success following this method. They hold the record for the first shipment of Fair Trade (http://www.fairtrade.net/) organic groundnuts (peanuts) ever exported in the world. However, they have also had problems finding markets, and in the past have sold their produce at far lower prices than necessary for longterm sustainability. I will hopefully elaborate on this situation in a future entry as I learn more.

Currently the cooperative is focusing on two main products, organic groundnuts and organic wild forest mushrooms (although they are possibly also moving into chilli peppers next season). Dried wild mushrooms have been successfully exported by the Cooperative in the past to Germany and the UK, but last year none were exported. The reason: the Cooperative's industrial mushroom dryer is no longer functional.

This is where I come in; my mission for my placement is to make sure that when I leave, the mushroom dryer is operational, while adding whatever additional value and insight I can to the Cooperative's operations. I won't bother with technical details for now, but suffice it so say that the dryer is big and scary looking, but that the situation is largely under control. For those who are scratching their heads and thinking back to my earlier discussion of solar drying technology, I was as surprised as you are by the details of my placement. Live and learn...

The dryer, and my coworkers Elias Mutwale (left) and Simon Mawele (right).

Integration

Since I've been here I've learned a lot. My lifestyle is like nothing I've ever lived. EWB always stresses integration as crucial to development work. There are many good reasons for this. Without a broad understanding of a local people's realities, doing good development work, or even assessing what good development is, can be nearly impossible.

On the surface I would appear to be integrating well. I live in a thatch hut, exclusively eat traditional Zambian meals with a Zambian family, and my Bemba is coming along well (if somewhat slowly). Furthermore, I have been able to participate in many aspects of the rural Zambian lifestyle: I have harvested maize, I have helped with housework, I have helped burn a firebreak for our house (that was a fun one), I shower with a bucket, my toilet is a hole in the ground, I have friends and aquaintances in the village, and generally, on the surface, I appear to be doing fairly well. For lack of appropriate words, I've uploaded some pictures to try to give a bit of an impression of some of ways I've been passing my time at home:

My friend Roden and my roomate Darrius who are eagerly learning guitar.

Myself and Darrius harvesting Maize.

Burning the firebreak.

This was fun...

The village pool table, where I spend a lot of time.

Why Integrate?

Life where I'm living is definitely good. I'm enjoying myself, and getting to do all kinds of fun things. However, integration isn't just something I'm doing to pass the time. It's a way to better understand the people that my program is trying to help. My current lifestyle is not doing this for me. The main problem is that I'm living with a coworker.

There are two sides to every development project, the implementers (the Cooperative), and the beneficiaries (the farmers). Currently by living with Elias I'm getting all Cooperative and no farmers. I really am finding I understand nothing about the day to day lives of the people we're trying to help; the people the Cooperative staff is working for. I'm feeling like I'll come back from Zambia with some nice pictures that look like integration, but with little actual understanding of day to day life for the people I came here for.

For these reasons, at the end of the month I will be moving away from my current home and out into one of the more remote villages of the Mpongwe District for the rest of my placement. Elias is very understanding and supportive of this which is excellent. Suffice it to say that life is about to take another interesting turn for me in a short while.

Thanks for everyone who read that. I've got to catch a bus back home before I'm stranded here so that will be all for this post. Take care, and I hope everyone's enjoying life, wherever you are.