Time In Agriculture

So I have been wrapped in chains with work and have had no time to reflect and make any blog posts for a while. This is my last week and I am doing two more rounds of presentations. The topics include: Personal Development - What it means to me, Goal Setting - How it can benifit you at work and within yourself and Agriculture Value Chains - A Big Picture Session.

I am scrambling around writting reports, having meetings with the MDGs and being on tv. It has been wild. I have so many stories to tell.

I have included something I wrote a while back that I never really polished up. Maybe you can forgive me anway.

Cheers,

Tony

agriculture in zambia: a perspective on rural farming in the copperbelt area

From what I have seen farming generally works this way: you grow maize (corn) and if you don't you are a sucker.

Everybody in Zambia grows maize because it is the thing to do, it would be as if you did not breathe in Canada. If you don't grow maize there is something wrong going on or you are crazy. Because maize is the main ingredient in the staple food, Nshima, there is a ever lasting high demand for it.

You will get money when you grow maize, this is garunteed. The question is how much and this all depends on the goverment. Since 11 million people live off maize (they eat Nshima here eat least once a day....most eat it twice...some 3 times) the government has stepped in to regulate the price of maize so it is fair for both sides. They do this by setting a price for the maize for which is must be sold at, the intention is that farmers get a good price to balance out the cost and makes enough money for the rest of the year....in a perfect situation the farmer would grow only maize and live off the profit for the rest of the year...but the system dosen't work that way....but should it really....i don't know.

The governemnt sets the price of the maize through an advisor/representative of the farmers across Zambia. How this person is elected I don't know, I have been unable to find out but it seems that this is a very important position and it would be necessary to chose one who is for the farmers....no? Well from what I understand, this is not really the case. The person currently in charge of advising on the price is not a farmer but a middleman who buys maize in order to process it. This person is part of the national milling industry who buys from thousands of farmers to process the maize into a product which is then bought by the pubic (and funny enough farmers themselves).

Why does this bother me?

Well I see it as a conflict of interest. This person represents the biggest buyer of maize in the country, why would he or she fight for higher prices for the farmers? In the profit scheme of things a buyer always wants to get the LOWEST price in order to maximize profit thus regardless of any promised good intentions there is always the doubt that this person has his/her hand in boths pots.

Right now farmers get K65,000 per 25kg (15$ canadian per bag) but is this a fair price for the farmers. Most say it is not, they wish for something above K70,000.
So what do you do when you don't get enough money from your stapple crop....
Grow other products!

This is were IDE comes in.

Maize is grown only in the rainny season (Nov-April) because of the large farmering areas used and the high water requirements for production, it is not impossible to grow during the dry season but because of the high water content you would need to be irrigating so offten it not be profitable.

Thus during the dry season farmers grow a variety (kinda...) of vegetables in order to make extra cash and food for their famalies. They typically grow cabbage, tomatoes, rape and onion...but there are many who grow bananas and oranges but you need lots of water and some sort of advanced irrigation technology (Zambian level) for those.

Right now most farmers are growing vegetables during the dry season as it has become a necessity in order to survive. From what I have experienced the farmers do it for extra money and for food (substinance), most do it for substinance. IDE (and the government from what I understand) is promoting the idea of farming as a buisness, thus catering to growing to make cash and not just to eat. This requires that farmers understand the bigger picture of farming in Zambia, especially at the marketing level.

When treating farming as a buisness, the idea of just growing cabbage, tomatoes, rape and so on needs to be changed because if everyone grew the same thing the market would be flooded and there would be low prices all around (imagine the supply and demand curves....high supply leads to low demand...leads to low price...need to find equilibrium....how?).

(Rural) Farmers usually sell to their nearest market as it is close. These people don't have trucks to carry their good so they transport them by foot (can you imagine carrying 50kgs of cabbage for 25km...they do it) or by bicycle...they do that too. Farmers usually opt to sell their products at a lower price because other markets are too far and the investment in a renting a truck is worrysome (sketchy driver, scared to get the same low price at another market...).

Transport is expensive because the roads suck. Straight up. If there were roads like the ones in back country canada here, things would be SOOOOO different...but there is not. The roads make things slow, they destroy trucks quickly and they make some places inaccessible because of the size and shape of the road.

There is a development theory which states the idea that if they just built roads in rural areas/countries development would solve itself....being here really makes me think about that...i really wonder about it sometimes...

Back to growing for a moment.

Since during the dry season it does not rain (not once from May-Oct) there needs to be a way to water your garden/farm. Most people do this by bucket (can you imagine watering one or two hectars with a plastic bucket...you also need to fill it up....you are walking back and forth alot...for a long time) which is exhausting and time consuming. This is the reason irrigation equipment is so great because vit reduces the back breaking labour of extracting and mobilizing the water throughout the farm, it also gives you time to relax and umm.....farm more? hahaha...free time here is still wierd to me...maybe they goto church more...I don't know....once irrigation is settled maybe we can start building libraries in rural areas to take up the time of farmers who don't have much else to do. wow, wouldn't that be great?!!? build libraries for rural people, start inpiring learning by reading....this is another conversation..

I am sure my thoughts have changed but this is my perspective at the end of June.

The mighty Photo Catch up

The mighty Zeeeeeeebra

The mighty VICTORIA FALLS

The mighty break and enter babboon

The mighty shaking painting sunset

The mighty moon in the sky oh like a pie sunset

Crazy Times: How I Hate The Internet Here

Well well well...

It's been a while since I have posted something on here. I know that some are wondering if I have died and others have thought that I have stoped. We'll neither of those things have happened (although the death one seems to have been a close one).

Let's just say my abscense has been a combination of a few factors:
-incredibly busy with work
-terrible internet connection here in Kitwe which has limited my photo uploading
-tons of traveling

These things together have limited my time at the computer and time to reflect and get out my thoughts.

Let's start with work.

Why the hell have I been so busy?

Capacity building. That's what I have been trying/doing with my co workers. An easy way of understanding capacity building is to think of it like training/teaching. To help my coworkers in areas where they asked or recognized that they could use some improvement in.

First thing I/We (I use we because everyone was doing this) did was conduct an assessment of my coworkers using something called a "market facilitation self assessment tool". Because my focus area is market facilitation this tool was developed solely to look at factors in market facilitation. Each person was to evalute themselves and then give me back the tool so I could look at the results and try to understand where the weaknesses were.

Think of being a foatball coach and getting your team to do a specific set of drills in order to see where they are all at. Once everyone did all the drills you see where all the low socring happened and make some exercises or trainings based on those weaknesses.

Thats pretty much what I did with my feild staff.

From the results of the assessment tool I came to the following focus areas in which is developed my workshops around:-Trust building with farmers and buyers-Data management for agriculture and reports-Coacing for leadership-Personal and Professional Development
For 2.5 weeks I researched and planned the hell out of these workshops (funny thing is, even up to the night before I was still scrambling to make facilitator notes and prepapre. Bed at 11pm, midnight ish. Up at 5am) which is what really pulled me away from communication in my life.

On top of the research I was doing my office asked me to conduct some market research here in Kitwe. This consisted of going to different restaurants and institutions and collecting data on what they buy in terms of fruits and vegetables, how much and what they pay for them. The goal of this is to develop a database so when the farmers we are working with are able to do farming in a more buisness like manner they can cater to all these markets. I feel like this is interesting but there needs to be a lot of work done with the farmers before this information can be useful.

Round 1

Everything came together on the 28th and 29th (Tuesday and Wenesday) and I had my presentations. Tuesday morning I held the Trust Building with Farmers and Buyers for two hours. During that time we talked about the fundamentals of trust, how do we define trust, how it is built, examples of trust in our lives, trust we have with farmers and buyers right now and tried to develop strategies for trust building in the future.

This session went alright, I had a hard time getting the big picture across altough I did get my major points across: Trust is built from a mutual understanding thus we need to help create a better understanding for farmers and buyers, Trust is built from a proven track record (past events) and Trust takes time to build. Every got a solid understanding of those points but I feel that my co workers did not really get why we were doing it and to be honest I don't know either other than they indicated low scores on trust building capabilities on their assessments.

Lesson learned: Need to target trainings not only to test scores but to voiced demand.

Round 2

Data Management for Agriculture and Reports. This session was a huge fucking hit. What I did was create a bunch of excel exercises within the realm of small scale farming. The goal was to get my coworkers to understand the math functions in excel, I see Chesiba using his calculator after he put data in excel. Little does he know with a few clicks excel does EVERYTHING for you.
Here is an example of a question we did together.

The Savoy hotel buys lots of different fruit every week. Using excel calculate how much it spends on fruit at the end of the month. Assume each week it buys the same amount.
Apples: 59 kg at 2000k/kg
oranges: 43kg at 5000k/kg
bananas: 100kg at 3450k/kg

Funny story: There are 3 people who work in this office. Aggie, Chesiba and Mwakoi. To me each are highly capable and I did not really know where they would be with respect to excel. I pictured them all to be a 4 out of 10. When we started I realized quickly that Chesiba and Mwakoi were a 2 while Aggie was a 8. She was like a child screaming "BOOORRRRIINNNGGG" and took my excerceise page and started doing everything on her own until she had a problem and called me over.

Although everyone was at different levels they all enjoyed this workshop. So much so they want more of these problems to work on because they claim it to be very very very useful. I got to show Aggie how to make graphs for her report and she told me that if she was going to remember for one thing it would be this. I felt pretty awesome after that.

Lesson learned: When making lessons for anything, if you can relate what you are teaching to similar things in that persons' everyday life it will become more accessible.

Round 3:

Wenesday. Day 2 of training.

The first day was a more participatory day. Participatory is used when the lessons require high amounts of participitation from the "students". Today's lessons were more traditional listen and ask some questions.

The mornings' workshop was about Coacing for Leadership not only because it scored low and their was a verbal demand from my coworkers but there are TONS of opportunities for them to use coaching skills in this project (RPI).

EWB has a great coacing handbook which was my main tool for this workshop. I pretty much just tore apart the workbook and made a workshop from it. We covered topics from "what is coaching" to "coaching skills" to "tools and models in coaching". Throughout the sessions we got into som great discussions about how coaching can be used here and how they are already using it but never realized it. It was great. The session ended up running late but that was cool.

Lesson: Sessions run really well when the content you have is great. Good content = Good session.

Round 4: The round that did not happen.

This is what happens when you burn yourself out.

After 3 nights of staying up till midnight and getting up at 5am this was bound to happen.
By the end of lunch I was out of it. Talking in front of a group of people and engaging discussion and exercises takes a whole lot of me. I started off the last workshop called "Personal and Professional Development" which was meant to be an easy going workshop figure my co workers would be tired of hearing me talked got flipped upside down when I was the one who could barely talk let alone make any sense.

I wanted talk about the advantages of personal development and what it means and how you can incorporate it into your work life here. I was going to use the idea of personal development plans to emphasize this and give of an example of how it works. Oh well, there is still 10 days of works left....oh my haha. 10 days is not much.

Lesson: Don't burn yourself out.

Funny I write that because last week in Livingstone I got into a discussion about work and burning oneself out. I was arguing how I would rather be busy all the time then take rests. I feel as if the work culture I have been used to for the past 5 years has always been about working yourself to the bone. I will rest when I am dead. Looking back at all my jobs they all were all composed of long work days (15 hours) 50% of the time. Yet they required very little critical thought, just the act of my body being there was enough. Having a job that requires mental capacity is really different. I would have never thought that thinking burned you out so much.
I still want to work hard and don't really appriciate rest....yet. I am thinking about it more. Espcially when my health is the shits. I find it rather funny how powerless I feel.

Well that was all the work I have done.

What's up next for me?

With 11 days of work remaining I need to get the following done:
-continue work on creating a strong connection with the development group at the university here "Mellenium Development Goals"
-Develop two more days of workshops per the request of my co workers.
-Visit Stravendale farms-Finish the market research here in Kitwe and Ndola
-Develop some sort of Database for the information

Yow...lots of work.
Should be fun.

Well.
Next blog post will be on Livingstone. I will as if I should take a break. Don't want to burn myself out.
Hahaha.
Chyea.
Tony


ps. i realize now at the internet cafe that i did not spell check this. oops.

pps. i have photos to post but the internet here is shit. thus. no photos.
sorry.

photos.

Photo of the day

the network has been a mess here lately.
i haven't stopped.
the internet has.
big update once things get better.

also.
leaving for victoria falls today.

It is amazing to think that depending on where you are born dictates the life you will live. If you are born in Zambia, there is a good chance you are going to struggle much more than if you were born in Canada or the United States (whoaa....ok....I know...I know...there is TONS of poverty in both of those countries but the probability of being in that state is much higher in Zambia or Ghana or burkina faso). But what does it mean to struggle? What does it mean to be in poverty?

If a impoverished Zambian where to come to Canada. Shit, if a middle class Zambian where to come to Canada and we compared our lives some would think they are in poverty. I would be hard pressed to find that a Zambian looking at a Canadian in poverty would deem them so.

What if someone came to you one day and said you were living in poverty. They said your living situation was inadequate, that your life could be so much "better". Worse off, what if you thought your life was pretty fucking good. Things were "hard" but you were managing while still having a "good" time.

How would you feel?

I would feel confused.

I used "" around the words good and hard for a reason.

How do you define a good life? What makes it that your life is hard?

Dissect your life. Pull apart the things that make it what it is. Try to outline the good and bad things that make it so. How many of those good things can you remove until it is no longer good.

-Family
-Friends
-Security
-Shelter
-Food

The three bottom things I would deem necessities in order to biologically survive.

But the top two....oh the top two are so much more. Sure you could get by on food, warmth, hide from the snow/rain but without company to hide from those things, to eat that food to share your "troubles" life seems so meaningless. So grey. A void.

But those are the needs that I exert in order to have a good life. I tend to have a lot more "things" in my life (camera, education, books, nice knives to cook with, clothes, music....et). If someone said to me, why don't you throw those things out? I would be hard-pressed to find an answer that could justify to keep them other than my internal greed (want) for these things.

Under pressing circumstances I could get rid of them, but how dire would the situation have to be where I would abandon my camera? Possibly (I feel certain but I don't think I could ever be 100%...feel like shit for saying that) when one of those 5 necessities where threatened.

I don't think there is a definition to a good life.
I don't think there is a definition to a bad one (poverty).
It is relative upon your situation.

I used to think that as humans we are entitles to the same kind of life. I attributed this to materialistic goods, ways of living, methods of interaction with others, resources....et.
But my views are based on the way of life I have been given, how I came into this life.

The way I want my life is not that of which many Zambians do. Some want more. Some want less. How do we work to ensure that people can achieve the "good" life they desire? Can it be done?

I seem to be asking a lot of open ended questions here. That wasn't my intention when I started this. I wanted to get down to how poverty and struggling are very different things for everyone. Kinda lost track......It is so easy to get confused when witting about these things because so many emotions that I don't understand come about me.

The idea of a "good" life baffles me.

I see urban poverty every single day. I watch elder woman beg for money on the side walk. I see them sleep with their hands extended. Blind men being guided around town by children, asking for money. I debate on giving money but am torn on the idea that it just supports this life and that if you hold out they will seek government help.

But is there really government help?

I looked into it and there are 3 government houses here in Zambia for the poorest of the poor who have no one to go. I do not know how these houses operate but from seeing all the poor just in Kitwe I wonder if a bullet to the head is a better solution (wow...this is harsh...sometimes it feels cold to say these things....fuck..it is the truth).

Is it a underlying human condition that some MUST suffer while others survive. Part of our instinct, not all can be equal....there must be a divide. Maybe we unconsciously create this poverty line in order to basque in our "good" life. Would our "good" life be so "good" if everyone had it? No it would not. If everything was sweet, would we know what sweet was? No. We would not appreciate it.

Is poverty our way of making us appreciate our "good" life.
Fuck I hope not.

I seem to be more and more negative or cynical in the past weeks. There are stories of success, there beautiful things I could talk about. But why? My co-worker told me this today "If you gave us the money we would forget that we needed the money from head office and just go about things, it would blind our need, the reason for action". I don't feel compelled to talk about success stories because happiness does not get things done. Anger does. Pure utter rage. That is where I am at.

I am just fucking angry as hell and want to tear the head off something evil.

I use fuck a lot because it perfectly conveys this emotion. I don't intend to use it in a vulgar manner but in a serious and emotionally deranged fashion where it is perfectly acceptable because I don't know any other word in the English language that ascertains so much anger.

Out.

Tony

The Ramblings from a long day

its funny looking at who you are.
this person you never see.
who can never talk back to you.
you only hear that person.
she him or her in pictures.
in video you see and hear them move.
discuss. argue. love.
but you can never directly do that with them.
this emobodiment of oneself.
the solid character of your thinking mind, acting being.
its scary to think that your mind has a body.
it controls something.
it is something but it can never interact with it as another being.
the idea terrifies me.
if i could interact with myself.
i am scared to.
would i be someone i would like?
would we get along.
or would we argue.
maybe we wouldnt even talk.
would we fall in love with each other.
should we not?
are you not looking for the perfect connection when searching for a partner?
or do differences matter. is that what attracts one to another.
the differences in similarities.
similar interestes but not exact.
those differneces create new pathways for conversation.
interaction.
expression.
but if too differnt.
then no realation at all.
no roads to those places were collaboration exsists.
but the assumption is that all beings search for a connection on a mental plane.
there is the possibility that people look for a physical connection only.
keeping the mental plane to themselves.
or to others. where their "lover" is out of the picture.
so where does that leave love?
can love be a physical manifestation? is it a mental/psychological one?
or is it a mixture of both?
can some only express in one way?
and others in both?
are there more ways?
spiritual...

to think that love is a chemical reaction in your brain.
maybe there are those who are addicted to it.
always floating from one partner to another as their love for someone dies over time.
then there are those who find someone and it is always there.
continuously exploding with love in their minds.
there are those who cannot contain it for one person.
but for many.
if not all.
there are those you cannot attain it.
always searching.
wishing.
endlessly.
there are those who dont want it.
but cant help it.
are a victim to it.
some things you just cant hide from.
especially when it is in your head.

funny how when you fall in love it hurts like someone just shot you.
but when you fall out of love it can come in many ways.
as a surprise.
as a shock.
or some just never even realize it.
maybe some dont even know they are in love.
maybe some dont even know what love is.

but then there are different levels of love.
those for your friends.
those for the world.
materialistic goods.
characters in books.
actors.
famous people in history.
music.
art.
animals.
your work.

do they all have the same magnitude?
are they even in the same playing field.
maybe they all play the same game but at different stadiums.
getting together at the same "love pub" at the end of the day to discuss their turmoils.

do we have a finite capability to love.
only 100 units to be spread across your system.
each area having a dynamic demand.
how do you feed all areas.
do you allow some to be cut off.
thinking that others will flourish.
maybe be more patient and they are understanding that time is limited and certain areas should be focused on at certain times.
or is it unlimited and you have infinite capability to love everything as much as the other.
maybe we are all different.

i think if i sat down with myself i would try to talk about this.
see if we feel in love.
or argued over our lover that we would have to share.
i would win.
or would i win.
maybe it would be a tie.
i know i would.