'Fresh' back from a second field trip to the Eastern Province having presented the voucher proposition to (nonplussed?) farmers with the help of an interpreter. 9 hours on the bus has allowed some time for reflection...
Over an Nshima dinner on Wednesday the conversation got around to discovering the 'real' Africa. It was suggested to me that I needed to live in a typical rural house with no electricity, no water and a pit latrine to really do so, (I should add that urban Zambian Chris wasn't too impressed by this lifestyle.) I've been living in Zambia for 5 weeks, but in Lusaka primarily, with two weeks or so spent in rural areas. As I've previously mentioned, my home there is very secure , and it's pretty comfortable inside. Likewise, even staying at a terrible motel in Katete affords me electricity, (although the sockets buzz concerningly) and a bath (water intermittent.)
After entertaining thoughts of a masochistic last 3 weeks of work here spent operating out of a remote village I realised that I probably won't experience first hand some African realities if I'm going to get the work experience I'm here for. Someone else reminded me that doing things because you think you ought to do them ususally doesn't work out. Nevertheless there are some realities that I have come into contact with directly or indirectly.
The first is how much people are paid. I'm hiring people at the moment to drive the voucher project in the East and have discovered that a wage of $10 (£6 or ZMK50,000) a day is a decent salary here. This took some time for me to digest and I had to lobby for some sort of bonus system before I could settle my conscience. To put this in context, a casual labourer can earn as little as ZMK150,000 a month. I'll let you do the maths. For a bit more context - sometimes Ferraris are spotted in Lusaka.
Reality number 2 is simply that this place is huge and getting to places in person would be difficult even if you drove a Ferrari. Added to this the spectrum of languages, confidence levels, formal skill levels and simply the settings for events can vary hugely. Yesterday I informally interviewed 4 people on the doorstep of my motel room - I had dragged chairs from the room outside. One of the people I spoke to had an Accountancy qualification, whilst another had left school with the bare minimum. With limited access to the internet, supporting this team, 8/9 hours away, will be an incredible challenge.
Final reality is that whether you're experiencing a very simple life in rural Zambia or trying to conduct business of some sort, if you're an outsider like me you know it's probably only for a set period. It's real, but only for a bit. That's unavoidable, and I'm not sure what I'll make of that until I get back.
PS - A correction from my first post. Many of the 2 million people of Lusaka are living in the compounds, which are shanty districts.
Friday, 27 May 2011
Tuesday, 24 May 2011
Chim(p)-fun-shi and the Biography of a Hippo
We left Lusaka at about half past ten in the morning and arrived at Chimfunshi at quarter to seven, after the Rapture. The last 20 km were the most exciting, negotiating a dirt track in the dark that led to the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, 8ft grass on either side and owls (or insert your own animal here) watching in the trees. Breaking down out here isn’t an option.
The little clearing and campsite was very welcome, in particular the burning barbeque or bri as everyone seems to call them here. After pitching the tent, opening the beers and meeting some Primatologists and Philosophers (Chimp philosophy: “I wanna be like you-hoo-hoo”??) the journey didn’t seem so bad. I discovered that the night sky is as bright and as clear as everyone says it is out in the bush.
Chimfunshi is the world’s largest chimpanzee orphanage in the very North of Zambia. Most of the 120 chimps are refugees from all over the world - Cindy, for example had come from Italian family who had giving up looking after her as a pet. Some have had pretty rough treatment. There’s also a hippo called Billy – more on her later.
When we arrived early in the morning we were greeted by Mrs, whose family have been looking after chimps for more than 30 years. We were given blue jump suits and we put crisps, biscuits and powdered milk in our pockets before climbing through a small hole in the wall into the enclosure.
Sims, Didi, Dominic, Cindy, Carla and 5 month old Kitten rushed out to greet us, rummaging in our pockets for their breakfast. Dominic, who turned out to be as troublesome as most 4 year olds, immediately jumped onto my head, almost making me fall over.
Cliched I guess, but it was like taking some people for a walk. The chimps misbehaved in a very human way with 4 year old Dominic deliberately winding up Didi and Sims by swinging on the trees and kicking them. Highlights: (1) Meeting a 5 month old baby chimp and his mother and seeing them behave just as humans would and (2) trying to teach Cindy how a zip worked on an anthill in the jungle.
When we got back to the orphanage, Billy the Hippo was lying comfortably under a tree. Frankly it’s impossible to imagine that an animal that wide and that rotund, with such short legs is biggest threat the animal kingdom has for a human being in Africa. Nevertheless, with that being the fact, it was disconcerting to be within 15 feet of her.
Billy was found under her dead mother’s body after she had been shot by poachers and was then raised at the orphanage, who discovered six months later that she was a girl. Since then she has acted as a guard hippo, being very protective of her adoptive parents when drunkards have appeared and has occasionally left to visit local wild hippos, but has always come back. She has a biography – “Billy the Hippo” – of which I am now a proud owner.
Friday, 20 May 2011
My other blog
This is a recent blog I wrote for Mobile Transactions:
http://mobiletransactionsinternational.blogspot.com/
http://mobiletransactionsinternational.blogspot.com/
Wednesday, 18 May 2011
Industry
This week has been a bit more mundane.
At work I have spent a lot of time on the telephone trying to agree the terms of the savings voucher for farmers. This has led to a couple of interesting meetings at the Soviet sounding Industrial Area of Lusaka.
It’s about as picturesque as it sounds. A maze of un-named undulating dirt tracks littered with car carcasses link up scrap yards, breweries and a Parmalat. Most of the traffic is from enormous trucks and brave taxis with soon to be broken suspensions. Finding a particular office is nearly impossible and for that reason I was almost an hour late for my meetings at Battery Express, Zambian Educational Publishing and Export Fertilisers. (It didn’t help that I thought that the former place was actually called “Patrick’s Place.”)
At the publishers I met some Zambian civil servants from the Education department and discovered that Zambia has Permanent Secretaries too. Whilst the building itself was dilapidated, the boardroom table was regal. To the table’s credit, by the end of the meeting it was pretty much agreed that vouchers for discounted school books would help to solve poor attainment in rural areas. Excellent.
The week’s exhausting conversations made me very glad of the opportunity to get out into the outskirts of Lusaka on Saturday to join the HASH House Harriers. HASH is a running (and drinking) club that seems to be a relic of ex-pat life. Everyone is given an odd pseudonym after attending a few times – this week “Bo Peep” was christened. We ran around a farm, watched by nonplussed Zebras and Donkeys, occasionally stopping to relocate the trail – part of the fun is apparently to attempt to throw you off track. When the run finishes there is a strange sunset ceremony where rugby club esque drinking songs are sung and various indiscretions punished with beer related fines. If this sounds strange, the reality was possibly a bit stranger.
At work I have spent a lot of time on the telephone trying to agree the terms of the savings voucher for farmers. This has led to a couple of interesting meetings at the Soviet sounding Industrial Area of Lusaka.
It’s about as picturesque as it sounds. A maze of un-named undulating dirt tracks littered with car carcasses link up scrap yards, breweries and a Parmalat. Most of the traffic is from enormous trucks and brave taxis with soon to be broken suspensions. Finding a particular office is nearly impossible and for that reason I was almost an hour late for my meetings at Battery Express, Zambian Educational Publishing and Export Fertilisers. (It didn’t help that I thought that the former place was actually called “Patrick’s Place.”)
At the publishers I met some Zambian civil servants from the Education department and discovered that Zambia has Permanent Secretaries too. Whilst the building itself was dilapidated, the boardroom table was regal. To the table’s credit, by the end of the meeting it was pretty much agreed that vouchers for discounted school books would help to solve poor attainment in rural areas. Excellent.
The week’s exhausting conversations made me very glad of the opportunity to get out into the outskirts of Lusaka on Saturday to join the HASH House Harriers. HASH is a running (and drinking) club that seems to be a relic of ex-pat life. Everyone is given an odd pseudonym after attending a few times – this week “Bo Peep” was christened. We ran around a farm, watched by nonplussed Zebras and Donkeys, occasionally stopping to relocate the trail – part of the fun is apparently to attempt to throw you off track. When the run finishes there is a strange sunset ceremony where rugby club esque drinking songs are sung and various indiscretions punished with beer related fines. If this sounds strange, the reality was possibly a bit stranger.
Wednesday, 11 May 2011
Negotiations
Two days of intensive meeting with 16 of Eastern Province's most entrepreneurial retailers over. The Righteous 5am bus has delivered me to Lusaka. So what did I learn?
Firstly, that going to alone without Alex and Kenan would have been pretty much impossible. They, like all the other Zambians I've met to date, bent over backwards to help me out.
Shops in Katete and Chipata are painted concrete rectangles with painted on signs, set about 10 meters of orange dust and gravel away from the road. Some are treasure troves of pots and pans, toasted sandwich makers and watering cans, hand labelled with prices. Others contain very little at all, perhaps a big stack of fertiliser or a few pots of chemicals and seeds.
The people who own the shops fall largely into two categories; (a) quiet men, teens or early twenties, understandably tentative at diminishing their seemingly already tiny margins (they often had seemingly very little stock) and (b) assertive, bearded, second generation Zambian chaps of Indian origin who seemed established and successful.
My pitch seemed to go down relatively well and most seemed keen to be involved in the voucher scheme. I'll call them back on Thursday, which given my language barrier could be tricky. If this was a task on the Apprentice I might have been fired for not pushing hard enough for the deal by now, but somehow that didn't seem right in rural Zambia.
I visited a School to ask whether the voucher could also be used to cover fees and the idea received a relatively warm reception. The inner playground was piled high well yellow sweetcorn drying out in the sun - surely the kids get sick of eating that after a couple of weeks? Still, the well dressed children at the school seemed better off than those I saw rolling tyres barefoot down a rocky hill in one part of Chipata. I still can't work out why, but it seemed pretty purposeful. Maybe it was for the buses.
My own culinary experience was a bit better as I had my first taste of nshima, Zambians' staple dish. It's a white, 'stodgy' (is that a word? if so is that how it's spelt?) rice-like oatmeal and it comes with chicken, pumpkin leaves and various gravies. You eat with your hands, which for me turned into a bit of a shambolic mess on my plate but it was welcome after trooping around shop after shop.
Firstly, that going to alone without Alex and Kenan would have been pretty much impossible. They, like all the other Zambians I've met to date, bent over backwards to help me out.
Shops in Katete and Chipata are painted concrete rectangles with painted on signs, set about 10 meters of orange dust and gravel away from the road. Some are treasure troves of pots and pans, toasted sandwich makers and watering cans, hand labelled with prices. Others contain very little at all, perhaps a big stack of fertiliser or a few pots of chemicals and seeds.
The people who own the shops fall largely into two categories; (a) quiet men, teens or early twenties, understandably tentative at diminishing their seemingly already tiny margins (they often had seemingly very little stock) and (b) assertive, bearded, second generation Zambian chaps of Indian origin who seemed established and successful.
My pitch seemed to go down relatively well and most seemed keen to be involved in the voucher scheme. I'll call them back on Thursday, which given my language barrier could be tricky. If this was a task on the Apprentice I might have been fired for not pushing hard enough for the deal by now, but somehow that didn't seem right in rural Zambia.
I visited a School to ask whether the voucher could also be used to cover fees and the idea received a relatively warm reception. The inner playground was piled high well yellow sweetcorn drying out in the sun - surely the kids get sick of eating that after a couple of weeks? Still, the well dressed children at the school seemed better off than those I saw rolling tyres barefoot down a rocky hill in one part of Chipata. I still can't work out why, but it seemed pretty purposeful. Maybe it was for the buses.
My own culinary experience was a bit better as I had my first taste of nshima, Zambians' staple dish. It's a white, 'stodgy' (is that a word? if so is that how it's spelt?) rice-like oatmeal and it comes with chicken, pumpkin leaves and various gravies. You eat with your hands, which for me turned into a bit of a shambolic mess on my plate but it was welcome after trooping around shop after shop.
Monday, 9 May 2011
The Katete Challenge
Catching a bus at 5am on a Sunday morning is not my idea of fun. Neither is sitting 5 per aisle or having gospel music powered down at me almost unabated for the duration of a 6 and a half hour trip. I say almost because occasionally the television would switch to a bizaare scene where a man appeared to be being attacked by an invisible deity in the middle of the bush.
The bus was insanely driven for good measure, but the wild open spaces, small thatched houses and great green forests of the Great East Road are beautiful. In the little town of Katete where I arrived, there are more cyclists than cars, so they get right of way.
My job for MTZL is to prove the concept that Zambian cotton farmers could potentially be paid using a voucher system rather than cash. Vouchers linked to farmers would be more secure for our client, who spend a lot of money insuring and physically protecting cash and should also enable us to harness the collective buying power of farmers so that they are offered discounts when they use them.
The objective for my first trip to Zambia's Eastern Province is to negotiate with Agricultural and other retailers to offer discounts if Cotton farmers accept vouchers for their cotton rather than cash. I'm also on the look out for staff to help with the electronic voucher transactions when they start.
Not easy, especially suffering from mild gospel bus trauma.
Kenan and Alex, two people who are key this work have sorted me out with a room and some food. Over chicken and mashed potatoes I thought about Kenan's suggestion of a Farmer focus group - very Civil Service.
The bus was insanely driven for good measure, but the wild open spaces, small thatched houses and great green forests of the Great East Road are beautiful. In the little town of Katete where I arrived, there are more cyclists than cars, so they get right of way.
My job for MTZL is to prove the concept that Zambian cotton farmers could potentially be paid using a voucher system rather than cash. Vouchers linked to farmers would be more secure for our client, who spend a lot of money insuring and physically protecting cash and should also enable us to harness the collective buying power of farmers so that they are offered discounts when they use them.
The objective for my first trip to Zambia's Eastern Province is to negotiate with Agricultural and other retailers to offer discounts if Cotton farmers accept vouchers for their cotton rather than cash. I'm also on the look out for staff to help with the electronic voucher transactions when they start.
Not easy, especially suffering from mild gospel bus trauma.
Kenan and Alex, two people who are key this work have sorted me out with a room and some food. Over chicken and mashed potatoes I thought about Kenan's suggestion of a Farmer focus group - very Civil Service.
Monday, 2 May 2011
A castle and two lions
My last few days has been in a number of ways similar to being at home. I wake up earlier than I'd like and I go to work. I come home, send some emails and maybe read. On the weekends I play football and do some grocery shopping and then watch some football on TV.
And there the similarities end. My new living arrangement is somewhat like a castle. It's behind the double padlocked iron gates and locked doors of a house within a 'compound' behind a wall and a 'guarded' gate, (the guard is not of the 'active guarding' school.) Perhaps surprisingly (surprising that I got this far) on Friday evening I found myself locked in the lounge - as a final precaution my new house mates had locked the internal doors. It was a new experience to be locked in to a part of my own house until 2 in the morning.
On Thursday I spent some time with colleagues negotiating a ludicrously high interest loan from a Micro Finance business in the middle of big, dusty, crowded Soweto market. This place has the dubious honour of the following description in my guide book, "notorious for robbery and pickpockets, if in a car, wind windows up and lock doors." I'm still planning my work here, but essentially I'll be proving the concept of paying cotton farmers with vouchers rather than cash; increasing security, reducing costs and hopefully increasing their buying power.
On the weekend I had the privelege of demonstrating my footballing prowess alongside some locals at the local Polo fields, where I hear Prince Harry's Zambian girlfriend can be found, (no further references to British Royalty will be made in this blog, but needless to say there was some interest in a wedding this week too.) On Sunday, Aaron Ramsey demonstrated how it's really done and gave me an excuse to describe where Wales was to amassed Arsenal and Manchester United Fans. Pretty passionate support here for both teams. One fan, who I named "Rooney" almost broke a table in anger.
The highlight came today however as I ventured slightly out of Lusaka city centre on the road for Kafue with some new friends. The best description I have for the farm we visited is 'shady' but after travelling along a track past discarded trucks, trailers and diggers you find yourself presented with a pinkish house with a back garden set against the backdrop of the bush, complete with Zebra, Buffalo and Impala.
Amongst the plastic dark green furniture in the back garden were two white Lion cubs. Beautiful. There are only 300 of these left in the World and I got to pat numbers 301 and 302. Needless to say I'm very pleased about this. There was one other Lion who was 9 months old in an enclosure and snacking on a chicken. Needless to say he was not so pattable.
The fabulous day ended with Ethiopian food and dicussion of cows and termites' contribution to global warming as well as the Crocodile that crashed a Congolese plane and the lady who, expecting to rescue a puppy from certain death in China, asked to buy it, which the retailer misunderstood...
A small note to end on place names that I have enjoyed so far: Wonga,(like the .com), and current no.1 Kalingalinga.
And there the similarities end. My new living arrangement is somewhat like a castle. It's behind the double padlocked iron gates and locked doors of a house within a 'compound' behind a wall and a 'guarded' gate, (the guard is not of the 'active guarding' school.) Perhaps surprisingly (surprising that I got this far) on Friday evening I found myself locked in the lounge - as a final precaution my new house mates had locked the internal doors. It was a new experience to be locked in to a part of my own house until 2 in the morning.
On Thursday I spent some time with colleagues negotiating a ludicrously high interest loan from a Micro Finance business in the middle of big, dusty, crowded Soweto market. This place has the dubious honour of the following description in my guide book, "notorious for robbery and pickpockets, if in a car, wind windows up and lock doors." I'm still planning my work here, but essentially I'll be proving the concept of paying cotton farmers with vouchers rather than cash; increasing security, reducing costs and hopefully increasing their buying power.
On the weekend I had the privelege of demonstrating my footballing prowess alongside some locals at the local Polo fields, where I hear Prince Harry's Zambian girlfriend can be found, (no further references to British Royalty will be made in this blog, but needless to say there was some interest in a wedding this week too.) On Sunday, Aaron Ramsey demonstrated how it's really done and gave me an excuse to describe where Wales was to amassed Arsenal and Manchester United Fans. Pretty passionate support here for both teams. One fan, who I named "Rooney" almost broke a table in anger.
The highlight came today however as I ventured slightly out of Lusaka city centre on the road for Kafue with some new friends. The best description I have for the farm we visited is 'shady' but after travelling along a track past discarded trucks, trailers and diggers you find yourself presented with a pinkish house with a back garden set against the backdrop of the bush, complete with Zebra, Buffalo and Impala.
Amongst the plastic dark green furniture in the back garden were two white Lion cubs. Beautiful. There are only 300 of these left in the World and I got to pat numbers 301 and 302. Needless to say I'm very pleased about this. There was one other Lion who was 9 months old in an enclosure and snacking on a chicken. Needless to say he was not so pattable.
The fabulous day ended with Ethiopian food and dicussion of cows and termites' contribution to global warming as well as the Crocodile that crashed a Congolese plane and the lady who, expecting to rescue a puppy from certain death in China, asked to buy it, which the retailer misunderstood...
A small note to end on place names that I have enjoyed so far: Wonga,(like the .com), and current no.1 Kalingalinga.
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