Love the Cipro

Despite the enjoyment of Mbezi game park it seems that the giraffe burger had some revenge on me. I woke up just before midnight with a cold sweat & feeling pretty ill. 5 minutes later I was dashing out into the dark with a mouthful of 1/2 digested dinner and my bum cheeks firmly clenched. After a bout of purging (with Ali watching half concerned, half laughing) and another wave of illness rising I downed one of the Ciprofloxacin tablets that my Dr Uncle had recommended we take. In 5 mins I was feeling like I wasn't going to be sick again and after half an hour was feeling much better.

So to anyone planning travels to anywhere with dodgy water or the like I definitely recommend that you get a script for Cipro from your doctor!

Community curreny & farmers market

One of the projects that we are both keen to work on is the community
currency and outreach to local settlements run by Daiton and Simba. The
project aims to strengthen community networks, improve livelihoods and
food security. The team have printed their own local money - Hours -
that represent an our of work and are equivalent to a dollar, although
in reality an 8 hour day for a farm labourer would earn much less than
this amount.
Daiton & Simba have set up a fortnightly farmers market for local people
to bring their produce and buy & sell using their 'hours'. This Saturday
we took our first trip along with them to see what happens.

Firstly they drive to 4 different settlements to take people to the
market. The settlements are quite spread out as they are situated on
old (white owned) farms that were invaded from 2000 onwards. The
properties are large, so the communities are dispersed and the distances
too great for walking (the only means that most people have of getting
around).
Going into the first couple of communities was certainly an eye opener
for me; the realisation of how relatively well off Kufunda is compared
to the majority of rural people and how severe an impact the land
occupation has had on people's livelihoods.
_______________________________________________________________________
A quick bit of background: as Z's economic situation deteriorated in the
late 90's the government could not afford to pay war veterans' pensions.
The solution that was decided upon was to allow the war veterans to
occupy white-owned farms, who mostly stripped farms of anything valuable
and sometimes taking up residence on the properties.
Most farm workers live on the farms they work on, so these people were
now out of work as a result, however many of them have remained on the
properties to try to subsist on the land. Other people have moved to
these 'contested' lands (contested since the original farmers are trying
through the courts to reclaim their land, but it will take years)
through family connections to the farm workers or through government
land redistribution.

Farm workers were normally given small plots to till alongside their
accommodation on the white owned farms, and pretty much all rural local
know how to keep a small crop of maize, pumpkins, beans, etc. The
problem has come that the people that are now occupying the farms do not
have the broadacre management know-how, nor the capital to maintain
infrastructure / buy agricultural inputs (fertilizers, other chemical
inputs, machinery, etc) required to manage large-scale agricultural
enterprises. Add to this the fact that most things of value have been
stripped out and what you have left are large areas of fairly poor
quality soil, little irrigation and no access to the chemical inputs
that made broadacre farming on these lands viable.

Driving around the farms to pick people up it was evident that people
are still trying to farm using a broadacre approach - large fields of
maize in poor soil, filled with weeds and very, very dry. This is the
approach that they know & worked on, however it is not necessarily
appropriate without the inputs that a managed business could afford.
_______________________________________________________________________

So, back to the currency project & the farmers market.
After everyone had arrived at the site (called 'Lot 2' after the section
of the old tobacco farm that was there - see pictures of the ruined
curing sheds) people arranged themselves in a semi-circle, laying out
the goods that they had brought to trade. It was evident that people
really didn't have that much produce to trade, both a result of being
between seasons and the amount that people are actually managing to
produce from their fields.
To open an welcome was made and a reminder why everyone was here - to
strengthen the community & to help one another get by. All trades were
to be done in hours. There was a short play with the theme of people
helping each other presented with a discussion afterwards about what it
meant. This is a good format for raising issues and I think could
certainly be developed further.

Ali & I were introduced as I'm sure there were a few questions as to
what the hell these white people were doing there(!) and it was
announced that we had purchased 20 hours and were here to spend it!!

The buying & selling, which was quite frenetic & most decent produce
disappearing quickly. We picked up a few avocados, a pumpkin and some
spiky cucumbers. After this people moved into their community groups
where Simba and Daiton provided people with a small amount of staples
(milli-meal, salt, sugar, oil - see photo) which they then divided up.

For me it is clear that there is potential there, but there are also
immediate issues that need to be solved before such a scheme can work
effectively.
* Firstly people need to have more to trade to strengthen the
system and allow it to meet needs. This will require: trading
services as well as produce; increasing crop diversity (most
people had brought along the same 5 things); and increasing
productivity (perhaps moving to more intensive gardening than
broadacre strategies)
* Secondly people need to be able to get to the farmers market
more easily. The tyranny of distance and no transport impacts
on peoples' abilities to participate. A bicycle project could
help to alleviate some of these issues as distances were short
enough to make cycling an option. If communities are going to
trade outside their boundaries then some method of transporting
produce to market is required.
* Thirdly there is the issue of hard currency and getting
businesses started - finance is needed to help people get their
own (or cooperative) businesses set up as currently capital is
non-existent. We are going to research micro-finance
opportunities.
* Finally assessment should be made for the potential of bulk
purchase of staples as part of a food coop (that Kufunda would
also benefit from implementing).

We are going to sit down with the team & look at some of these options
and decide how some of the issues can be overcome. I think that we can
help especially in areas of project mgt and behaviour change. Looking
forward to it!

Kufunda week 2

Its the end of week 2 (10 days in) and we're starting to get better
with our fairly basic cooking facilities. It has taken a bit of
adjustment cooking dinner on 3 small electric rings that are shared
with the family we are living next to, after having the facilities of
oven, grill, 4 ring gas cooktop, electric kettle, microwave, blender,
toaster, and outdoor bbq. Unfortunately no wok stir fries for us
then! We seem to have cracked the maize meal porridge (read gruel!)
with peanut butter for breakfast; omlette is good for lunch and dinner
is mainly chicken/ bean/ pumpkin/combination stew with sadza (more
maize meal, but thick like mashed potato) or rice. Ali has also got
handy with making a sweetened fried bread that is a bit like a large
scone which is also pretty good with stew.

This week we have started to put our fingers into a few different pies
with respect to different projects and figuring out where we can be
most effective. The Kufunda team had their first review for the year
that looked at the projects they have been working on, how they have
been progressing and how people feel about their work.

A couple of things have become evident to us: firstly there is a need
for better project planning and project management; and secondly that
people are wearing 'too many jackets' and have spread themselves
thinly across a lot of different projects.
To this effect Ali & I are going to write and deliver a project
management course for the team here & provide support to help them
integrate the training into their work practices. Good project mgt
should hopefully help to clear up the 'too many jackets' issue as
people better understand resource allocation.
As a result of some of our comments with the different project teams
during the review, we've had a couple of evening sessions with a few
people to help them get their team plans together a bit better. In
addition to the boxing 3 times this week we've been pretty busy!

On Saturday we went out to the farmers market with Daiton & Simba (see
next post) and today we were expecting a trip to see a football match,
but this got cancelled & we went to Mbezi Game Park, about 30 mins
walk up the road (insert website). The grounds there are lovely, a
proper little bit of luxury if it comes to the point where we need it.
We had lunch (giraffe burger for both of us!) and then took a guided
horse ride through the park to see Zebra, Impala and Giraffe. We met
the owner who showed us around the site a bit more, and ended up
driving us home as his wife wanted to come & check out Kufunda, and
she ended up leaving with some of David's mushrooms! Definitely going
to go back there for canoeing & fishing in weekends to come.

All up a busy week, but good to realise early on where we can be
useful to the team here and the work that they do beyond Kufunda.

--
Check my blog!
http://aandaafrica.blogspot.com/

First blog from Kufunda: saadsa, mushrooms, water shortages and children are non-stop vortecies of energy

Its 26 deg & sunny. Can't say that i'm missing the gloom of London one little bit. We're 4 days in at our time here & things are going well. We've found out that we need to do our own cooking (here were we thinking of a big community kitchen) and that night time means going to bed (yes, asleep by 9pm, but loving it). This a bit of a long post, but i'm getting it all down so that I can remember what it was like when we first arrived.

After having a bit of a freak out over how much stuff we had ended up bringing (a 46Kg limit does nobody any favours & thank god we left the bikes at home) we got on the plane for our night time flight to Nairobi. We had an unexpected transit (it was scheduled, just no-one told us) in Lubumbashi in DR Congo where we sat on the runway for an hour. Flying over the city was pretty interesting - the only tarmac in the whole place was on the runway & it was the first time I've seen people walking their cows along the side of a runway!

On arrival at Harare we were happy to see that our Oz passports got us a $25 discount on our visas compared to UK passports; then when we got our bags back I found that someone had kindly nicked my phone from one of my bags - my own fault for leaving it in there I guess!

We arrived at Kufunda in time for a large lunch of beans, salad and saadsa (sp?) that is the staple carbs over here - coarse maize flour cooked in water that forms a sticky dough and beautifully soaks up stews.

We are sharing a 3 room house with a family of mum, helper & 4 lovely kids that are really starting to see how much attention & use of our cameras they can get out of us. They're also teaching us some Shona, in particular the little 6 year old Molline who has us on about 10 new words a day.

So far we haven't got started on any project work; the first week is about meeting all of the Kufundees and finding out about their different work areas and deciding where we can fit ourselves in. Additional to that we are invited to think about what skills we have that we would like to share with the community (of about 30 adults & and an evolving number of kids). There are a big number of projects going on here - construction, permaculture, medicinal herbs, mushroom cultivation, children's education, community outreach and using their facilities to host workshops and courses run by other organisations.
When we got here an organisation called Tree of Life was running a 2 day healing workshop with victims of political violence and torture and had a really interesting conversation with the workshop facilitators that evening, and they have invited us along to one of their future workshops that will be in english.

We have met with a few of the teams running the different projects; the mushroom cultivation project with David is really interesting. Kufunda are constructing a new mushroom shed to expand his work, and he is running training courses with other communities on how to do it. Maize, bean & other crop wastes are inoculated with oyster mushroom mycelium and left in the dark to colonize. After 2 weeks they are ready to start producing mushrooms of high nutritional value & costing only several hours work each week. Ali & I are going to help David put together a training manual that he can leave with his participants, as well as some short how-to films that can be uploaded to the web for other training organisations to use.

The permaculture gardens are suffering from a lack of water as the electricity transformer here has broken, meaning that their electric pump is out of action. Although the soil is sandy & the ground rocky there is still a fair amount of potential for getting things going here using raised beds and appropriate plantings. The Permaculture guys were pretty stoked with all of the info that I had brought over to share, which made those 2am download sessions worth it!

Our days are pretty domestic at the moment - waking up with the sun (around 6:15) and cooking maize porridge for brekky, then hanging with the kids, doing some gardening & reading then cooking for lunch and maybe a walk in the afternoon. Ali strangely seems to be enjoying a bit of domestic duties - making bread & saadsa, cooking & even cleaning! Very strange ;)
David took us on a walk around the larger farm's boundary yesterday afternoon. He is an amateur ornithologist and showed us an amazing nest of the drongo bird, and we also saw 3 eagle owls. An sunrise trip is planned to get some better photos, if I can get Ali out of bed, ha ha.

Looking forward to settling in this week on some of the existing projects and getting one or two of our own things going. Ali is already ahead of me, holding a boxing session yesterday for a couple of adults and about 10 kids. They've been requested 3 times a week, so that's going to keep us busy!
Some pictures soon!

Areas of interest & research

Since working at Earthwise (in Subiaco, Perth) I have been interested in sustainable food systems, permaculture design, sustainable technologies,urban agriculture, community development and related topics. Rather than getting into design I fell into the community education field, working on projects to promote sustainable behaviour through campaigns and social marketing. The purpose of this trip for me is to get back to hands on work that is practical and local, rather than top-down and remote.

If you are interested in finding out more about any of these areas, here are a few links to get you started; there really is a massive amount out there. I have downloaded about 3 phd's worth of reading material to take with me, plus stacks (like 30 gb worth) of useful articles that I can share with people over there on subjects from biogas to beekeeping, water filtration to wind power. This is of course in contradiction to the previous paragraph about being practical rather than theoretical - but most of it is reference!!

Permaculture: start with www.permaculture.org.au
Urban Agriculture: www.cityfarmer.org; www.ruaf.org; www.idrc.ca

Appropriate Technology: AT Library - http://www.villageearth.org/pages/AT_Library/ - over 1500 texts across a variety of topics (intro to Appropriate technology; water & santiation; agriculture; aquaculture; forestry; agricultural tools; crop storage & preservation; health; construction & building; education; energy creation; transport and more)

and 3rdWorldCD, which has 13 gb of useful info to download as a torrent - www.cd3wd.com/

Community development texts: www.idrc.ca - they have lots of ebooks on comm dev, evaluation, gender issues, economic development.

Stacks of useful stuff through the UN's FAO, i haven't even started on it yet.

There are also plenty of files, videos and audio through torrent sites, scribd, youtube and elsewhere.

Getting to Kufunda - what we've had to do

1. Decide that we are going to go 'somewhere' to work on a project where can get international development experience.
2. Identify what we both want to get out of it: what particular experience do we each want to learn?
3. Search for projects that will enable both of us to fulfil our goals. This involved internet searching, paying some agencies to find projects for us. This was helped by having some background knowledge of some projects through permaculture networks, but involved about 2 weeks work trawling through different options and a lot of bad information. There are an awful lot of projects that are set-up to fund themselves through paying volunteers rather than being a proper skillsharing opportunity. It is also difficult to understand what you will get out of the project in terms of experience, especially if you want it to be more than a holiday. We were really looking for something that will potentially lead-on or stand us in good stead for employment in the development sector, so our criteria were fairly strict.
   
4. Get in touch with shortlisted projects to find out more about them. Explain what we are looking for, the skills that we have and how long we are expecting to stay there for.
   
5. Refine list based on feedback, practicality, costs and other parameters; prioritize projects.
6. Contact the projects on the priority list; get accepted (hooray!).
   
   
7. Research the country in more depth, speak to the people from the project in more depth about what we need to bring, what we should bear in mind, what to expect.
8. Research and plan finances, logistics of travelling there, vaccinations, visas & documentation, travel insurance, safety considerations, what we need to bring with us.
   
9. Decide date for travel that fits in with the project.
   
10. Undertake neccessary logistics - book plane tickets, book in for vaccinations (cholera, rabies, hep B, hep A, typhoid, yellow fever, diphtheria, tetanus, TB, polio, meningitis), secure travel documents.
    
    
11. Begin packing up life in London - taking stuff to charity shops, selling stuff on ebay, moving out of the house, start saying goodbyes to people. Pack & repack, whittling things down.
    
12. Lots of things having to get done on final days, and not enough sleep. Just about got there - only need to get on the plane now!

Saturday 11th April

3 days to go. Its been fairly lousy weather in London - grey, cold, wet. Sort of good as it means I don't mind being inside and doing errands, and also I don't get nostalgic for staying here as London is great when the sun is out. Andrew & Renae are enjoying the northern lights in Iceland so I can take the opportunity to spread my stuff out for packing.

Last night was brilliant, Jimmy organised a surprise party for Ali & I; 13 of us all up, great food a few drinks and a bit of wii sports. I'm really going to miss everyone, such a great bunch of people and we've really had such a good time over the last few years.

All things have to come to an end though, and I'm really excited about the adventures that await. I think I have done everything that I wanted to do here; most of what I had been looking forward to for this year in the UK was all out of London - more mtb, cycle tours, hikes, festivals, etc. I think when it comes down to it the big city starts to erode my enjoyment of life. There is plenty to do, but it isn't necessarily the experiences that I am looking for any more.

So not to bigger & better things, but very, very different things, a whole new way of life that I can't yet imagine. I really hope that Kufunda will allow me to integrate all the things that I have been learning to date, and put them into practice in a really practical sense that has benefits for the people that we are working with there.
We still don't know exactly what we will be doing there, or exactly what the set-up / system is. We do know that they are doing some very innovative things and that the approach appears to be a practical application of a lot of things I really believe in, but we shall see! We are both really excited and ready to get going, it really will be a relief when we get there so we can stop talking about it and get on with doing it!

Nearly there!

We are just about ready to go now. 5 days to go, and 5 days of restful easter holiday with half of London going away everywhere will be a bit more chilled out.
Finished up at Richmond today, one last meeting to get the cycle buddy scheme underway, it will be interesting to hear how that goes.

The last few little things need to be packed away or chucked out, or bought. I still need to sort out what we are doing about our bikes - the plan of taking them over there doesn't neccessarily seem the best idea anymore as insurance won't cover them, but it would be so good to have a reasonable steed out there. Something for the weekend i guess!

A few things to get finished: get travel insurance, sort out a few accounts & finances, pack the bag, sort out what to do with the bikes, post the ebay sales, take last few things to charity shop, buy a few little bits, catch up with people to say goodbyes.