Kufunda week 3 1/2

OK, here's the week 3 update - a little late (trying to keep up with them every Sunday) due to busy weekend activities and a lack of power at Kufunda. It gets difficult to think back more than a week ago, but as I make notes back in time things slowly emerge from the mists of my mind (& at least I don't have the normal weekend haze of london to contend with!).
Again there is plenty that has happened, I'll try to split it up so people reading this don't have to read everything, but I've got what I want to remember down. On reflection I think early on this last week was where the reality set in & Ali & I both got a little bit frustrated & p.o'd with things - bound to happen after the high of being somewhere new & exciting. A couple of things combined to give us the WTF?s but I think we're through it now (I'm sure there will be more to come).

The weekend was great however and has been really interesting. We went to Harare International Festival of Arts, we are really fortunate that this was on when we arrived as it gave us a forum to meet a few more lovely people & get a taste for the 'Harare vibe', as well as seeing a couple of great shows.

The power is now back on at Kufunda, so I think that work will really progress now as everyone can work later (lights to see & not reliant on fire for cooking), their computers will work & the water will be on to water the gardens. We are feeling like we are starting to create a bit of our own structure about what we are working on & this is also making us feel a bit more grounded.

Last Tuesday we went to the opening show of HIFA. We were invited to go with David and his wife Wendy & stay over at their house in Harare as getting back to Kufunda at night is nigh on impossible without our own vehicle. David used to be a tobacco / maize / cattle farmer north of Harare before 'liberation' of properties occured. He is now working for an organic farming outreach programme that is doing some work on Kufunda fields trialling organic farming methods and extracting essential oils from a wild tagetes variety (a type
of marigold) that their company sells to the french perfume market.
We dropped our bags at his house & then went straight to the venue as it got busy early & we needed to get tickets. The show was sold out & after a bit of a trawl for scalpers (none around) we decided we needed a good story to the box office that someone official had left tickets for us to collect as we had just flown in. Ali worked her magic and we ended up with 2 free tickets to the show, nice work babe! First scam of the trip pulled off! We were in extra luck as David & Wendy were at the front of the queue to get in & we ended up with a great position with them at the front.
The show was really interesting - a mix of dance and song that was pulled off well with an obviously much smaller budget than available to similar shows in Perth or London. We were surprised at the overtly political message of the show; scenes of president RM & his cronies throwing money around & ending up chucked down a hole in the stage by the poor that had risen, and testimony to the hundreds that had died in last year's political violence. The audience was mainly white Z's

On Wednesday we stayed in Harare to get some work done at 'the book café - a bit of an artists & cultural hub in Harare with fast(ish) broadband, and strangely no books. One of the bonuses there was meeting a guy that runs the UBUNTU support for Harare (he noticed that we were running it) who also works with young people to set up microfinance & social enterprise projects. I am hoping that we can work with him to both get ubuntu on the computer systems here and also look into the potential for getting some of his young project teams to work up some social business projects with Kufunda. Ali & I have both been reading 'Creating a World Without Poverty' by Muhammed Yunnas, the person that set up the Grameen Bank in Bangledesh. He puts together a very strong argument of how the capitalist business model can be turned into 'social business' to lift a lot of people out of poverty and run environmentally sound companies, and gives some examples of where it is already happening. We'd both like to see if we can help something similar get started, and I would recommend that anyone interested in development issues or business / commerce has a read of the book. Potential social business ideas that I can see to link with Kufunda include an OPV seed company, agricultural & horticultural consultancy, vermiculture & waste management, energy technologies (solar pv, solar cookers, biogas) and herbal remedies.

Thursday we were back at Kufunda, the place was a bit of a buzz as the transformer for the power supply had arrived. The guys from Z E S A, Z's equivalent of a national electricity company arrived in the afternoon (supposed to be here in the morning) to turn off the power and to direct the installation. The transformer was massive & weighed 700kg. It had to be raised and sited about 5m up a concrete pylon. Although the Z E S A guys were supposed to have a crane all of their cranes in the country have disappeared due to mis-management. So the method was to use a double pulley with some of the Kufundees helping to lift the 700kg mass off the back of a ute & pull the pulley. It really didn't look safe to me & I kept away - the rigging didn't seem to have enough strength to hold the load. 1.5m up off the back of the ute and the hook holding it gave way, the transformer fell, injuring 3 people, very fortunately not seriously; any higher or if it had bounced off the ute 2 people could have easily been crushed. I was really angry as they were rushing to get the job done on an afternoon before a long weekend; I could understand the urgency - they had been without power to the main village for 120 days, but it is really not worth having 2 of the most productive men in the village taken out for several months or permanently for the sake of spending another week figuring out how it could be done safely, a winch & some scaffolding seemed like the idea to me. The guys came back the tuesday after the weekend, this time with stronger kit & got it up, but it still would never have passed for basic occ health & safety anywhere that had it. The power was turned back on that night & music was coming from various stereos around the place! A few days without power gave us an unwelcome taste of how most people in rural areas live. It isn't pleasant having to cook everything on the fire, and it takes time to collect firewood, especially once the immediate wood to hand has been used. We see lots of people taking firewood from properties along the way into town. This is actually illegal, but people have little choice if they are going to eat. A lack of money and shops within walking distance means that all food has to be cooked (people basically live on sadza and beans). Additionally no power means that once the sun has gone down little productive work can be done as there is no light to see by. I'm keen to investigate solar cookers, but we need to find a model that will allow people to cook sadza (which needs a lot of heat energy & regular stirring) as people here don't seem to want to eat anything else. Its interesting to note once again that cultural barriers (ie, everyone eats sadza and there is little else available in rural areas) is such a barrier to people taking up a technology that could make their lives easier.

Friday David took us back in to his place for more HIFA for Friday & Saturday. Most of the shows that we wanted to see had either been on previous nights or were sold out, and we felt it would be pushing our luck to try to scam it again! We managed to get tix for a couple of good African musicians and a jazz 3 piece from New York who were pretty good. The atmosphere was really good, people were really friendly, not pushy at all; it was sort of a mix between a PIAF (perth international arts festival) crowd and more of a typical young persons music festival. Despite lots of people drinking there wasn't any trouble, and this is the general feel of Harare, everyone is very amiable and interested to meet you. Allan from Kufunda introduced us to some of his mates from Harare who were really cool, have travelled quite a bit and they've invited us out to some other gigs in town & another festival out on the Mozambique border (need the malaria tabs for that one!)

We called it a night about 11:30 on Saturday night despite everyone else continuing to party, as David & Wendy were taking us up to their country house on Sunday quite early. They had lent us their car, so we drove back through the streets of Harare which are a bit like a rally course in themselves, no street lights, most traffic lights working but not all, big potholes in the road & they occasional pothole so big that they have put up a sign (unlit & about 5m in front of the hole). Just as well there is very little traffic as it would be a bit of a nightmare.
In the morning we jumped in the back of their ute for an hour's drive up to Barwick. The journey was really nice, seeing the countryside go by, with some big jagged hills that looked sweet for mtn biking & hiking. The countryside is amazingly populated, the rooftops of little villages could be seen over the top of the long grass all of the way up the road and lots of people just walking along the side of the road carrying goods or waiting for a hitch. Hitching seems to be one of the main forms of transport here as the buses are few & get over-full in the towns that they depart from. I still think that bikes could go a long way to helping people get between communities, but when they barely have enough money for food, getting even an old deadly treadly is likely to be beyond them unless a creative approach is taken (bamboo bike project?)

David & Wendy are totally awesome, and have some great stories to tell about life here before the troubles; they loved the farming lifestyle and are big fans of the outdoors. They are obviously really sad about what has happened, but not bitter, saying that they have to be thankful for the time they had and what they still have compared to a lot of people in the world. On their farm (which was big, but with only a small percentage of arable land). They employed over 200 people, providing them with wages, accommodation, some land for growing crops, a health clinic, a primary school, a community hall and more. When the invaders arrived their employees all wanted to defend the farm but D&W asked them not to as they knew it would bring more trouble. D offered to teach the invaders how to farm the land & make it profitable (none of them knew how) and also offered for them to take on their staff who knew how to manage the farm (this was also refused). End result is that 19 people were given the land where before over 200 were earning a livelihood, and none of them know how to farm it, so assets were sold off for a quick return and there is no capital to properly manage the land. D&W said that if they were compensated for their land they would go back to farming straight away as they love it so much.
We had a great briarr (SA for bbq) for lunch & met a couple of their friends that still own their farm, but only just. They have lost over 70% of it to 'liberators', and changed their production from beef, maize & tobacco to horticulture (beans, peas, passionfruit, etc) they they farm intensively. They had a friend in the vicinity that supplied over 40% of the mange-tout (snow peas) to the european market - so that's where sainsbury's were getting them from.

Monday we got up for a very early drive back to Kufunda, arriving just as a massive downpour was going on. It was really heavy & interesting to see how much rain they get here in a good downpour. There was loads of run-off eroding the un-tarred roads out to Kufunda, and it must be causing a fair amount of topsoil erosion from agricultural land as well. I'm going to work with the permaculture guys to look at some water harvesting & erosion minimisation earthworks for before the summer wet season.
Unfortunately power was still out & the rain meant we couldn't cook on the fire either. I took the opportunity of a lift into town to get some ready to eat foods, but the trip that was supposed to come back at 3pm didn't get back to half 7, leaving Ali stuck here with no way of cooking any food all day. While in town we went through the Mbari markets, which is in the middle of one of the really poor high density areas. We were ok with the Kufundees, but told not to go there by ourselves as there was some risk of someone trying something on. The guys said that there were 10-15 people living in the rooms of the high rises near to the markets, windows were broken & boarded up or replaced with cloth or plastic, or just left open. Loads of rubbish everywhere and hundreds and hundreds of people hanging around with nothing much to do. And the same thing will be happening across cities all over the continent - pretty depressing.

Tuesday however the power got sorted out, so now everything is back on the move again. We've got to crack on with this project mgt training course, so doing that, helping to finish the floor of the dojo, working on the waste mgt plan and working on the currency project. Time to go & get busy!

Oh & I just ate caterpillar for lunch; tasted a bit like shrimp, but not quite as juicy. Sorry for the lack of pics, but net connexion is slow, but now that we have power again I'll try in the evenings when no-one else is using the bandwidth!