Okay. So I am frustrated with sitting down at a computer with very limited time and racking my brain to try and think of something interesting to put on my blog. Instead I am just going to copy a letter I wrote to my Mom on October 31, 2006. Sorry Mom, I guess I won't bother to send it now, but I promise to write soon.
Dear Mom,
Sorry I haven't been writing as regularly as I used to. I have no good excuse, but I will give you a bad one anyway. First of all I haven't been as busy as when I first came and thus I don't have as much to write about. Second, the things I have been doing are pretty much the same as usual, so writing about them seams kind of redundant. I do still get all of your letters (thank you very much), and thanks to you I think I an winning the prize in our Peace Corps house for getting the most mail.
So, I will tell you about my day today even though it wasn't anything special. I woke up and went through my normal morning routine. After that I started off on my farmer visits around 8:00. I wanted to get an early start because it gets miserably hot by noon this time of year. I didn't make it very far before I ran into one of my neighbors who was working in his field. The night before I had gone with him to burn one of his fields the he is going to be working this year. The way it works is that the men go in these fields and cut down all the trees. The women then come along and have the unfortunate job of having to pile all these trees in a big heap for burning. They usually do this with a baby on their back and sometimes one in their belly as well. Around this tiem of year they light this heap of dry trees on fire and use the ash as a kind of fertilizer to grow finger millet. It is really hard work and really unsustainable, but it is awesome to watch it burn. This time of year these fires light up the sky every night outside my house. It's like having my own personal light show from my front porch.
Back to my day. As I was greeting this neighbor a small girl ran up to me and told me that I was being called to come and join a group of guys that were sitting under a tree nearby. Anytime I am called by a group of guys sitting under a tree it can only mean one of two things. Either they want something from me or they want me to drink beer with them. In this case it was the latter. After greeting them I was offered some village brew called Katata. This is a simple mixture of fermented maize and water. The taste is not bad, but it was not appealing to me at 8:00 in the morning. I tried to explain to them that I had work to do and I couldn't drink beer with them. They didn't really understand the whole concept of "having work to do," so I ended up just explaining to them that I had already ate my breakfast. They seamed to accept this as a reasonable excuse not to drink and I started on my way.
My first stop today was at a farmer's who stays in the village next to mine. I had taught him a short lesson on small scale gardening a few weeks earlier and I wanted to see if he had actually tried any of the things I had taught. I found him on his way to water his nursery, so at least he had gotten as far as making a nursery. As far as anything else I taught him. Not so much. I wasn't too disapointed. I have kind of gotten used to people not trying the things I teach them.
The next two farmers I went to visit weren't home. The forth one was home and lucky for me, just as I showed up his wife had finished cooking some chicken and nshima. I hammered some food and we went to see his ponds, which looked really bad. I couldn't get too mad at him though, because one of his children just died (the second in two years), so he hasn't been around much to manage his ponds. After that he wanted to play some board game, that is like checkers, with his friends, so I went to the next farmer's house who happens to be his father and the headman of my village.
This guy is probably the world's worst fish farmer. He has about 10 fish ponds, of which only about half have water in them at any given time. Of these five, only two or three actually have fish and all the fish only grow up to about the size of my pinky. Basically, he is a mosquito farmer who happens to have a few fish in his mosquito ponds. I can never get mad at him though, because he is old and short and I think he is loosing it a little. I didn't even bother going to his ponds with him, because I already knew how they would look. Instead we sat under the shade of a tree and chatted for about half an hour. His Bemba is almost as bad as mine, so it makes for some entertaining conversations. In fact, I'm not even sure that he is speaking Bemba at all. He may be speaking some strange dialect that he made up himself, because nobody in the village seams to understand him. After our lost in translation conversation I started off for the final farmers house.
This farmer's kids are in love with me for some reason (I think it has something to do with the fact that I am white). They are three and four years old and everytime I go to his house they jump on me and run in circles around me saying in Bemba "I am Mr.Devin, I am Mr.Devin." It's a little strange, but cute, so I role with it. This farmer, like many of my farmers this time of year has a shortage of waterfor his fish pond. He has rigged up a ingenious, but grueling method of getting water in his pond. He built a shelter over his bore hole where he gets his water for his pond to help prevent water from evaporating. He then climbs down in the bore hole and throws water up and out of the hole and into his furrow. I got tired just watching him do this. Sometimes I wonder if this whole fish farming thing is really worth the hastle. After watching him empty his bore hole for the day, I was tired so I started off for home.
When I got home I was really excited to lay down and rest, so that's what I did, since it was about 150 degrees by then (not really, it was probably only about 90 degrees, but I had just watched a guy empty his bore hole by hand, so I was really tired). I knew that two farmers were supposed to com and meet with me in the afternoon, but I was secretly hoping that they wouldn't show up. As luck would have it, just as I was dozing off and starting to have a crazy dream about water skiing with crocodiles, the farmers showed up.
I had recently wrote a grant and sent these two farmers to a one week workshop on conservation farming in Lusaka and we were meeting to make a schedule and lesson plans for them to teach other farmersin the area. Of course, just as we were getting started the chairman of the fish farming co-op showed up. They all got into a long discussion/argument about something (I had zoned out by then and was imagining what it would be like to water ski with crocodiles. Do you think the X-Games would pick that up?). An hour later he left and we could finally get down to business.
We set the schedule for when they would teach the surrounding farmer groups without too much trouble. Then I asked them how they planned to teach what they had learned. One of them gave me an answer something to the affect of "Oh, we'll just go bit by bit until we have taught everything we learned." I readjusted in my chair because I could tell that we were going to be there for a while. A few hours later we had clarified exactly how they would go about "teaching bit by bit until they taught everything they learned."
The rest of my day was pretty uneventful, so I will end there. Just another hard days work in the bush.
Love
Dev
