A Country without Bridges

I was recently talking to one of the PACE participants who had shown up an hour early while I was setting up the classroom and preparing for the workshops. Justin is a twenty-two year old man who has not yet finished high school. He's very smart and obviously capable of graduating from high school. He is also a peer educator. He lives on the road between the school where I run the workshops and the place where I stay, so we always ride back together. Half the days he bursts into song as he dodges the rocks in the road that would destroy his rims if he hit them. The other half he recites things he has read in books, learned in other workshops, or heard on the radio. I'll have to write down what he says one of these times. It's hilarious, and I have no idea why he does it, but it makes me think that he has a photographic memory.

 

I asked why he hadn't finished school. He simply said that he had been forced to repatriate in 2004. I followed up on that because refugees can not under any circumstances be forced to repatriate, and if this was true it was a huge deal. "My parents forced me to go," he said, which was a different story. I asked why he decided to come back and he told me that it was for an education. He had spent all of his life in Meheba and had been educated under the Zambian system, which was relatively high quality and in English. Angola's official language is Portuguese, which I don't think he speaks. If he does, it's certainly not as good as his English. He said that if he would have tried to finish school in Angola they would have forced him to start at a much lower grade level than twelve, which is where he would be in the Zambian system. So he returned to Meheba last year sometime hoping to finish school, and, if he can find a sponsor, go to a college or university in Zambia.

 

"Why can't you go to university in Angola once you complete your education here? You'll have your diploma," I asked.

 

"There are no universities in Angola," he said.

 

"None?" I asked again. He shook his head. There were no universities or colleges in Angola. I was stunned.

 

Two days later I was talking to Victor, a former librarian who I had worked with last year. He was on vacation from the University of Zambia, where he is currently studying, and came back to Meheba to visit. We started to talk about higher education, and I mentioned how shocked I was that there were no universities in Angola, which was also where his parents were from. He retorted that there were universities in Angola, but that they were in the capital, Luanda, which no one could reach.

 

"What do you mean, no one can reach them?" I asked, confused. He went on to explain how the roads are in a terrible state of repair in the country and almost all the bridges have been destroyed - over 700 in total - by the war. He said that there are many large rivers in Angola and because the bridges have been destroyed, there is essentially no way to get from one part of the country to another except by plane, which - as you can imagine in a country that is still recovering from recent civil war - is completely unaffordable for pretty much everyone but the richest Angolans and expatriates.

 

I got out the pocket atlas that I always carry with me (which is one of the best ideas anyone has ever shared with me, by the way) and looked with him at Angola. Sure enough, there are rivers all over the country. I tried to imagine trying to get anywhere without crossing one. It would be impossible. As I looked at the map, I considered how almost the whole population of Angola was stuck where they were. If you wanted to go to university, you had better be able to afford to fly to the capital, stay there for a few days to fill out the necessary paperwork, and fly back. There's no working postal system, according to Victor.

 

Imagine the implications of no bridges for business and trade. There's no way to get imported products to the inner part of the country, so they would have to be flown there. Of course, the transportation costs are just added to the price of the product, so I imagine that no one can buy anything that anyone bothers to import that far. The same thing for exports. No one's going to be able to afford to ship products by air to the capital or the ports and sell them for a profit. What a big deal to be missing all your bridges. How could you possibly develop as a country without a way to get people and things from one part of your country to another?

 

Victor said that the Japanese government or a Japanese NGO (I can't remember which one) had offered to help rebuild the 700 destroyed bridges, but you wonder how fast that can happen. Building a bridge isn't exactly an overnight project.

Good Teaching Day

I redeemed myself yesterday. At the end of last week we picked projects and had a general idea of what the projects would do. The women finished an hour earlier than I had planned on them finishing. I dove straight into the next lesson which was to think of every little thing that we needed to do to get the project done. I call these little pieces of work "activities". I hadn't prepared to teach that lesson on that particular day. I just dove in, explaining that now we needed to decide exactly what we were going to do to complete our project. I received ten blank stares - the kind that could have either meant "That's a good question. I am in deep contemplation about it" or "I have no idea what the heck you are talking about, but I am not about to be the first one to admit it." Unfortunately, it soon became clear that it was the latter. I spent the next fifty-five minutes trying to explain what I seemed to think was a fairly simple concept but to no avail. By the end of the workshop they were just confused and I was just frustrated.

 

I biked home disappointed in myself. Anytime that my students don't understand something I always assume it is my fault. It's hard to blame someone who doesn't know something for not knowing it. Any teacher who gets angry at students for their ignorance is just a bad teacher. A teacher's job is to figure out what students know, what they don't know, what they need to know, and figure out a way to get teach them the things they need to know that they don't know. I hadn't done my job as a teacher, and I'd gotten frustrated with the situation. I am a perfectionist with pretty much everything I do (except making my bed) so I was upset the whole weekend. The more I thought about what I was trying to teach, the more I saw how complex it was and all the steps that I could have taken to explain planning more clearly. I took a few hours to make a new lesson plan that started from the beginning and walked them step by step through the process.

 

They say that teaching is the best way to learn. I agree one hundred percent. While writing this lesson plan, I gained a much clearer understanding of how to think of all the little things you have to do to get a project done, which is NOT nearly as easy as I had thought it was. From my experience, when you are writing a good lesson plan, you know it's a good lesson plan. Everything fits together perfectly. Each step is clear, and there are checks along the way to make sure that everyone is understanding what you are talking about.

 

I went into the workshops yesterday knowing that I had a much better lesson plan. And sure enough - it worked. In less than an hour, they were listing off all the little pieces of work that will need to get done in order to do the project. They were thinking of pieces of work that I hadn't even considered yet. This part of the planning process is crucial. If the project was like the Frankenstein monster, we would currently be creating all the internal organs. It would be pretty terrible if we patched it up and set it off without kidneys or a pancreas or vocal chords. It wouldn't get very far.

Jeffrey and I are on the Same Page

I've been reading The End of Poverty, a book by Jeffrey Sachs that discusses the causes of extreme poverty throughout the world and describes what he believes needs to happen in order to eliminate poverty by the year 2025. It is an excellent book. I don't think that I could be reading it at a better time. There are some times in my life when I feel like several things come together at just the right time. This is one of them. Almost every page resonates with me. I feel like many of his insights and conclusions are ones that I have come to over the past two years of studying at Boston University and working with FORGE in Meheba. He talks a lot about taking a clinical approach to eliminating poverty, by which he means identifying the specific causes of poverty in a particular country, region, or community and creating a solution to address poverty there based on the particular combination of causes. That's what I've been trying to do with PACE. It's exciting to see my thinking reflected in this book. Jeffrey Sachs has been thinking about this a lot longer than me and has a lot of ideas that I haven't thought of and work perfectly with how I think that something like PACE could help to eliminate poverty.

 

I view PACE as something whose future is constantly evolving in my mind. Even the lesson plans that I've made change based on things that I learn about the participants, the community, and the problems that we are up against. Lately I've been thinking of PACE as an investment in a community. My ultimate vision is to be able to give a community all the knowledge and resources that it needs to make it onto the "ladder of development" as Jeffrey Sachs would call it. I'm still not sure everything that this investment might entail and how it would be different for different communities. That's why the approach needs to be so adaptable. I do believe that we're making a great start in Meheba with PACE. Something I just read today in The End of Poverty reinforced that belief.

 

In the chapter entitled "Making the Investments Needed to End Poverty" there is a section called "Investing in Technological Capacity" in which Sachs says, "Rapid economic development requires that technical capacity suffuse the entire society, from the bottom up... The trick, I believe, is to train very large numbers of people at the village level in creative and targeted ways, specifically for the main tasks at hand. Every village should aim to have a group of village experts, who have enough formal training to address basic technical needs at the village level." He goes on to give examples of a community-based agricultural extension worker and engineer. The PACE participants' projects incorporate both of those things. The women doing the agriculture project are planning on hiring an agricultural extension worker who will give workshops to people about modern agricultural methods and technologies. The men doing the transportation project will be hiring a mechanic/driver who will be in charge of operating and maintaining the vehicle that they will be buying for the community to use.

 

In just over a month, the participants of PACE have come to some of the same conclusions about what investments should be made in their community as what Jeffrey Sachs, the international expert economist on poverty, has come to after years and years of researching and thinking about the problem of extreme poverty. That leads me to believe that I'm doing something right here. The fact that these solutions are coming from the community members who are participating in PACE means that making good future decisions about what investments should be made in the community will not have to depend on my presence or the presence of anyone but those PACE participants. I just need to make sure that PACE is available to help make those investments when no one else is willing to make them and to continue to help them to find other places willing to invest in the community.

 

Ending extreme poverty is possible. It just requires the right investments. I am SO excited to have the opportunity to help make those investments. For a long time I've wanted to be able to help stop suffering I see in communities like Meheba. As each day comes and goes I feel like I'm inching closer to that dream.

One Man's Trash

There's a big pile of trash just about 20 feet outside our compound. I can see the pile through the window in front of my desk in my room. Today I noticed two primary school girls - maybe 12 years old - walking around outside the compound. They were moving slowly and looking up at the trees. I figured they were looking for fruit on one of the trees, although I'm not sure what kind of fruit they were hoping for since I don't think anything is in season. Then they saw the big trash heap and started to move towards it.

 

I watched them crouch down to pick things up and hold them out towards each other, probably inquiring whether they thought whatever it was was worth keeping. I wasn't sure how to feel about the whole thing. It's kind of strange watching someone go through your trash. I guess at first I was embarrassed. Your trash is kind of an intimate thing, when you think about it. It says a lot about how you live, what you consume, what you read, and what you don't value. Then I was curious. I wondered what kinds of things they thought were valuable that we - apparently - thought were trash. They picked up milk cartons, big pieces of paper from an old calendar, some plastic sacks, and a couple other things I couldn't identify. I wanted to know what things are valuable to them so that I could try to clean them up and set them out for people to take so that they didn't have to go through my trash.

 

I wondered if they would have been embarrassed or ashamed if they had known I was watching them. I don't think that there's anything to be ashamed about. I and many others I know go dumpster diving in the U.S. In fact, in college towns such as Boston around September and May, when people are moving into and out of apartments, it can be a great way to make a few extra bucks, furnish your room, or find some surprisingly nice things for your place. Is there anything shameful about picking things you value out of heaps of things that someone else doesn't value?

 

Maybe it's all the filth that's mixed it with the valuable stuff that made me uncomfortable. I really wished that the girls didn't have to touch all the dirt and rotten food scraps that were out there. Maybe I should separate my trash from now on. Maybe we should burn our trash or put it somewhere where it's not just out to be picked through. Maybe I shouldn't do anything. Maybe there's not really a problem. Maybe if these girls' families made a decent income and could afford the nice things I can afford, the things I think are trash would be the same things they think are trash.

 

My Idea of a Good Time

We had mini celebrations in our workshops yesterday. Both groups decided what problems they wanted to address. The men unanimously decided on addressing the problem of a lack of transportation in the community. Every woman but one voted to pick the problem of poor harvest. Both groups tried to get me to vote, but I told them I wasn't going to have to live with the project; I'd be going back to the U.S. in a couple months, so I shouldn't vote.

 

After the votes were counted and the problems had been chosen everyone in the room seemed to be excited. It had been pretty clear for the past three weeks that transportation and poor harvest were the foremost problems in the community. We had been hearing it from everyone. So we had a mini celebration - a round of applause - and a couple of the women let out some "Yey yey yey"s, which I think you might have to hear to know what I'm talking about. I'm guessing that everyone is relieved to have the needs assessment and problem identification part of the curriculum finished. I can't tell you how many times I said and heard the word "mambo" - "problem" in Swahili - over the past few weeks. Because all the written work we do in the workshops is in Swahili, I now recognize the word for every conceivable community problem in Swahili. We've discussed each problem so many times in so many ways that I think in the past few days it has gotten to the point where it's so repetitive it's almost boring. I have to remember that this is a good thing. It means that we're not forgetting anything.

 

Now comes the exciting work. After the 30 second celebrations, I told the participants that we were going to be diving straight into the next step - ensuring that we have a complete understanding of the problem, its causes, and effects. Today we started to break down the problem and create visual diagrams of them, which help to see identify the different ways in which we can approach the problem with our project. Then we start putting together the details on how the project will really work.

 

When I put it that way, it doesn't sound so exciting. But when you consider that these details have the potential to increase the annual income of the people in the community by up to six fold, it gets a lot more exciting. Imagine increasing your annual income by six times! I know I'd be excited. My calculations are based on people's projections that with good seeds and fertilizer a given area of land will produce three times the amount of corn that it currently does. Transportation will allow the community access to markets where they may be able to sell their corn for three times the price that are currently forced to in Meheba. Of course, some of that extra income will have to pay for the costs of the inputs and transportation, but they should still come out way ahead.

 

Of course, this is all just in our imaginations right now. These are dreams, but slogging away on boring details can make exciting dreams come true if you do it right. Hard work isn't enough though.

 

My graduate advisor - who says wise things every four sentences - once said that hard work is not hard enough. She told us this is something her freshman have difficulty understanding. After receiving Cs or worse, some of them come back and tell her, "but I put more time into this paper than I've ever put into a paper before; I can't get a C." A good paper is a good paper, and a bad paper is a bad paper. It doesn't matter how hard you work on a bad paper. It's still a bad paper.

 

I try to keep that in mind a lot as I work on PACE and teach my participants. There is no doubt that we are all working hard. But hard work guarantees nothing. Many people have worked for much longer than I have and failed miserably or actually made the problems they were trying to fix worse than when they started. The key is good, thoughtful, meticulous planning. For the next month, we will be planning meticulously - examining our problem from every angle and molding a solution. Few people would describe being meticulous as exciting. Some might say downright boring.

 

But success is exciting. And so is having the means to give your children three meals a day, send them to school in nice clothes, and get them to a hospital when they are sick.

Cycling to Work and Back

I love to cycle. One of the first indicators that I am in a bad mood is when I get annoyed while riding a bicycle. Every day I ride thirty minutes to Zone F during the hottest part of the day. The sun feels just a couple miles above me and just rolling up my pants to get on my bike makes me start to sweat. But I usually enjoy the ride anyway. Today I didn't.

 

My tire was flat when I got on my bike to leave, so I had to pump it up. I took off and immediately noticed the noise of the tire rubbing against the metal fender, which I had to stop several times to bend into place. It continued to croak anyway. A drop of sweat dropped onto my glasses and evaporated right in my line of vision. A fly followed me for at least a mile, landing on my ear every few seconds, which I find amazing - in an incredibly annoying way, of course. A squeak emanated from a part of my bicycle I couldn't identify. Each time someone greeted me I had to force myself to respond.

 

When my attention wasn't clung onto these annoyances, I could only think about the few ways in which PACE isn't going well. There have been problems with the surveys that will have to be fixed before we can calculate any results. Fixing them will take one or two extra days, pushing us a bit behind. We're on a tight schedule already. This could happen with other things, and it's possible I might have to rush some parts of the curriculum to finish before I leave. I can't extend my stay for various reasons. These thoughts repeated in my head.

 

I was in a bad mood. This is what happens when I get in a bad mood. I focus on the things that aren't going perfectly. There aren't many, but nothing ever goes perfectly, so there's always something for me to blow way out of proportion. The mountain of information and skills the participants still have to learn seemed... well, like a mountain. And not one of those little mountains that look like big hills - we're talking the big mountains that you can't even see the tops of.

 

By the time I arrived, I had convinced myself that this pilot of PACE was bound to fail. I waited at the community center for my translator. The first person to arrive was Justin, one of the PACE participants. It's hard to stay in a really bad mood when he's around because he's always singing and smiling. There's something about his voice too. His words bounce as he pronounces them. He got my mind off the specific ways in which PACE was doomed, but I still managed to be kind of grumpy even after a couple minutes of talking to him. My moods are stubborn and hard to push around - at least the bad ones.

 

Then Justin jumped into how great the first day of their focus groups had gone. All the PACE participants started their own focus groups yesterday without me there. There were eight groups total. I had been in Solwezi as I usually am on Mondays and wasn't able to make it for the first. I was excited to hear how it had gone.

 

Justin said the focus group participants had been impressed. They already felt that their ideas were really being considered and valued - that just maybe something was actually going to come of all this surveying and focus group stuff that PACE has been doing for the past three and a half weeks. That maybe PACE is different from other projects. That it just might deliver something valuable to the community. That succeeded in putting me in a better mood.

 

Almost an hour later, I was watching Justin and two other PACE participants run their focus group. I was so impressed. They were doing everything they were supposed to and more. They were so much more animated than they had been when they practiced facilitating a focus group in the classroom the week before. As they gave directions they were pointing and waving their hands around and speaking with confidence. Then, when it was time to listen, they sat down, maintained eye contact, nodded, and made repeated what the person had said before writing it down to make sure they had heard correctly - stuff I hadn't even taught them.

 

I was reminded once again how people tend to rise to the occasion. This was no exception. They were getting valuable information about the problems in the community, which was the whole point. They were taking what I had taught them and adding adding their own ideas and style to it. I could have been upset that they weren't doing exactly what I had taught them, but as my translator told me what they were saying, I realized that they understood the point of the focus groups, and that any changes they were making were intentional improvements. I couldn't have been much prouder as I sat in the back of the classroom watching them facilitate their focus group.

 

Over the course of the afternoon I wandered through each of the eight rooms where the focus groups were being run. Each one had a different feel to it - a combination of the style of the PACE facilitators and that of the participants. The most boisterous was the group of young women being facilitated by PACE women; there was no doubt they were sharing they opinions. The most formal and quiet was the group of older men being led by the PACE men. All different, but all discussing community problems.

 

On my way back home, the noises on my bike fit together to make a funky song that I managed to figure out a way to whistle to. I greeted every person I passed, even if they were too far away to hear me.

Power of Ideas

All the PACE participants finished their focus groups today. I spent four hours walking from classroom to classroom in the basic school where they were holding their focus groups and sat in for a bit. My translator went along with me but had to hop in and out periodically in order to deal with any logistical issues that came up - a cup went missing, someone ran out of tape, there wasn't any more water left in the jug someone had brought. When he was not with me I was left to practice listening to Swahili, trying to pick words out here and there. The ones I recognized the most were the words on the lists of problems that I had written down and heard dozens of times by this point - poverty, transport, poor harvest, discrimination, school, hatred, etc.

 

Of course, my mind wandered off every now and then. I can only strain to listen and understand about five percent of what is going on for so long. I thought about the fact that for the past four days eighty people - eight groups of ten people - had been meeting for two hours each day to discuss problems in their community. What had made them all come together to discuss these problems? Why were the PACE participants spending eight hours of every week to sit in a classroom with me and talk about problems? There was no offer of money. Even the participants of my workshops themselves do not yet know that I have twenty million kwacha - over 100 times the amount of a good monthly salary - to give to whatever projects they decide to implement in the community.

 

Up to this point, I have offered nothing but ideas (and watches, t-shirts, and some kool-aid) to the participants. And I have only begun sharing the ideas. We're only one quarter the way through the curriculum. The most exciting stuff is yet to come. I sometimes forget how exciting and truly empowering it is to be introduced to a new idea that has the potential to change your life. When I think back on the past two years in graduate school, where I learned most of the things that I am teaching here, I remember that feeling of sheer exhilaration when something we were talking about just clicked in my head, and suddenly a part of the world that had been cloudy and gray to me before was suddenly illuminated. Some days I would literally bounce in my seat, my head filling with ideas sparked by what I was learning.

 

The best part of gaining new ideas is fitting them together with all the things you already know. It helps you to realize and appreciate all the things you already know. The participants in my workshops already knew most of what they are using to identify and understand problems in the community. They knew transportation and poor harvest were huge problems, they knew those problems' causes and effects, and they knew how to get people to talk.

 

As my translator came back in the classroom and sat down next to me on one of the wooden benches, I tried to understand what I was doing here? How had the few ideas I had brought motivated so many people to do things they would never have done before? My thought was cut off by my translator, who started to tell me what was being said. They were talking about FORGE. I wasn't sure if this was just for my benefit. I'm sure it must have been a little bit, but it was probably also genuine. One thing I have learned about people here is that they rarely sugar coat their opinions in such situations. If you disappointed them, they'll tell you to your face.

 

One of the men said, "We are seeing things we have never seen before in our community because of FORGE. They have come and are asking us about our problems in order to solve them. No one has ever done that before." I couldn't help but smile. It's hard to imagine a better compliment.

Focusing on Women

Today I had a chance to sit in the back of the classroom and whisper during my workshops. For the past few days I have been training the participants how to run their own focus groups, which are a method of collecting in-depth, qualitative information about the community's problems. Over the course of four days, the participants create a list of all the major problems in the community, vote for the most important ones, and discuss the top few. We talk about the causes, effects, and potential solutions to the problems.

 

I had demonstrated how to facilitate discussion last class, and today I gave them a chance to get some practice facilitating conversation with each other before they start running their own focus groups in a couple days. I sat, squeezed into a seventh grade desk, behind the semi-circle of women who were discussing the top issues they had identified in the community - poor harvest, transportation, and school fees. My translator was inches from me and I hunched over so that I could hear him well without him having to speak too loudly. He was translating as the conversation evolved, and I noticed that if he spoke too loudly it made the women stop talking and wait for him to finish for me, which always breaks people's train of thought and makes for less animated and interesting conversation.

 

The women were really worked up at various points. My translator listened and summarized the points for me, so there were many points when I could just listen to the women speaking and try to figure out what they were saying from the few words I could understand and just watching them. Sometimes, one of them would start to speak loudly, and enunciate in a staccato fashion, as though making a formal speech. Her eyes would widen, and whatever gestures she made with her hands usually involved a finger pointing somewhere. And when she finished, all the other women would nod and give verbal signs of affirmation that I couldn't understand past knowing that they were in agreement.

I was quite proud as I sat there, thinking about the fact that my presence was so unnecessary at that moment. They were discussing problems that they really cared about, problems that they were all familiar with and had lived with for years and years. I had been worried before that they would think this exercise was silly because everything they were discussing was so obvious to them, and obvious to everyone. But they seemed to find it quite useful. One of them said afterwards that the exercise made the community problems fresh and clear in their minds.

 

I considered what things I would think of if I was doing a similar activity about my community in Somerville, MA where I had lived before coming here. I wondered if there would be such a clear consensus on the community problems. Probably not - mostly because the community is much more diverse. Here, in Zone F, most people are in very similar boats. They come from Congo, a few from Angola. Most were not farmers when they arrived, but people dropped them off somewhere in the camp and told them they'd better figure out how to farm pretty quick if they didn't want to starve. Imagine being a secretary, a banker, a businessperson, or a politician and being handed a hoe and some seeds and being told to make some food out of infertile land that you had no idea what to do with or your family would starve. Most have learned to farm now, but still have a lot to learn. Many don't know how to use fertilizer even when they do get it. They don't know when to plant what crops. They don't know how to best set up fields. They have to ask their neighbors and trust that they know what they are talking about. Even those who were farmers before worked in different places with different soil. I found all this fascinating.

 

I also found some of the ways in which they described what it was like to live with these problems eye-opening. One woman said, "Someone who is uneducated is a sufferer. She will face many calamities all the time because education leads to a higher standard of living." Another said that the effect of having a poor harvest way to "make you like someone who is in prison because you won't have freedom of movement. You will not be able to go anywhere because you will not have money from your produce. You will be stuck behind bars of poverty."

 

I got goose bumps listening to them. The problems they were talking about all came back to lack of farming inputs and lack of transportation, indicating that these may very well be the projects we end up selecting. And they seem so solvable right now. It'll take work, money, thought, and organization. But we've got all of that at our disposal. Of course, we still need to talk to others in the community, but the puzzle is quickly taking shape. I wonder if they already knew what the puzzle would look like. In any case, the process of putting it together certainly makes the picture clearer for us all, regardless of whether we had seen it before or not.

Giving a lift

I think I mentioned before how people give rides to others on the back of each others' bikes. I always want to give people lifts on my bike, but I normally only give people lifts in the most necessary situations. The bicycles that we have here are some of the shoddiest bicycles I have ever ridden. When you first buy them you anticipate certain, let me say... treats. The pedals invariably break and fall off, leaving just a metal rod to push against. It's pointless even trying to get by for one day without replacing the factory pedals. Often there are parts missing that you wouldn't know were missing just by looking - like bearings. The spokes may be loose, making the wheel bend like a taco the first major bump you hit, which inevitably happens when you are the farthest point possible from home. The grips are painful. The chain rings slightly bent. The bolts are made out of reconstituted aluminum foil so that when you tighten any of the nuts on the bolts, it strips the bolt, leaving it even looser than it was when you needed to tighten it. This is a classic problem for the seat posts. Even when the seat is as high as it goes it is too small for my six foot three frame. Then imagine the seat all the way down to the frame because it can't tighten. Many refugees have been quite amused by the sight of me pedaling back home with my knees coming almost up to my face. Sheer delight.

 

But I'm used to all that. My point is that the bikes are weak. Weaker than you can imagine. And I am over two hundred pounds. Add another person of significant weight, and the chances of getting to the destination go from slim to toothpick width. At this point I never even consider carrying someone on the back of my bike. It just doesn't occur to me anymore.

 

Today I was on the way to road 36 where I could use electricity to type this very message you are reading when I saw a little boy in a school uniform and flip-flops running. I've been learning Luvale greetings lately (it's about time after being here for several months) so I thought I'd test it out on him, figuring he was Angolan since the place I was in is dominated by Angolans.

 

"Ngachiri."

"Ngachiri yenu."

"Where are you going?" I asked him after the long pause when I was using my pneumonic devices to remember how to say it.

"To 36." he said, huffing and still running.

 

He couldn't have weighed more than 60 pounds. And while my wheels weren't any more trustworthy than usual this morning, the rest of the road to 36 was relatively smooth and I figured an extra few pounds wouldn't matter too much. This was my chance to give someone a lift. Maybe the only chance I would have for a while. I stopped and pointed to my rack. He said nothing - just hopped onto the rack, straddling it - and off we went.

Domingu

Let me tell you a little bit about Domingu.

 

I may have mentioned him in a previous post. He's the son of the woman who we hire to clean and cook for us. He never started coming to the compound until all the facilitators left and it was just Cody - the FORGE project manager - and me left there. Cody and I still aren't sure if his name is Domingu or Domingo or Doming or Domi. Alice, his mother, seems to trail off at the end of the name, so I just follow suit when I am pronouncing it. I use different variations depending on what kind of mood I am in. In any case, he always knows I am talking to him when I decide to address him.

 

I suppose part of that could be that he is usually the only one around besides Alice. Because most of the people in the community I work in are forced to farm to survive, whether they are really farmers or not, they are busy cultivating in their fields in the morning, meaning that all my workshops are in the afternoons. So my planning time is in the morning. I spend most mornings in the small U-shaped compound we live in, where Alice, Domingu and I hang out.

 

Domingu is a tiny kid. We think he might be eleven or so, but he is the size of a seven year old in the U.S. I sometimes forget how darn small he is. Once when we took our soccer ball out and started a pick-up game across the road at the soccer pitch, I was reminded. He was on my team, and sometimes I would see Cody (who is my size) going after the ball at the same time as him. So picture this little seven year old sized kid running barefoot alongside this hulk of a dude with nothing in mind other than getting that ball. If I was Domingu I would have had the fear of a mountain moving toward me, but Domingu seemed unphased and sometimes got the ball away from Cody.

 

He is skinny and usually wears the same red and blue shorts. I can't remember what the shirt he wears looks like, but I'm pretty sure it's always the same one because I notice when it's a different one. He has shoes now, which he only wears to go to school. They look sort of like the shoes that you think of the Frankenstein monster wearing. They are black, have a flat toe, and are about two sizes too big for him. He has flip-flops too, which they call "tropicals" here. He almost never wears them though. A couple times we have seen him leave to go home with Alice and then rush back in to get his tropicals. Like, "Oops. I these razor-sharp rocks that I am walking on could kind of be uncomfortable to walk forty-five minutes home on." I can't even walk ten feet on the rocks with my bare feet. He's a tough kid. They all are here.

 

Having him around helps to make Cody and I even lazier than we already are. He lights a fire for us around five thirty, just when we are getting home from work. When we go to pump water from the hand pump that is in the middle of our courtyard, we usually can't get in more than about three pumps before he pushes us aside and starts pulling the pump up and down like a monkey. He has a certain stance that he assumes when he is pumping water that Cody and I try to impersonate, but it just looks and feels silly when we do it. Feet spread apart really close to the pump and slightly arched over the pump. All legs, no back. It sure works for him. He pumps water faster than anyone I've seen.

 

Someone recently attacked his hair with some scissors. There are some spots on his head where you can see the skin and others where you can't. Somehow, it makes him cuter. He has a shy smile. Much of the time he spends sitting on the couch that we have out in the courtyard. We set out some crayons and paper for him to play with. He draws numbers and little pictures with the words "I love God," on them. He juggles the soccer ball sometimes.

 

He's not around as much anymore since he started up school again. He's a fixture in Meheba for Cody and me. It wouldn't be the same without him. He's the kind of kid you want to have or else want your kid to be friends with.

I Love You Time

Aria, one of the project facilitators who was here in Meheba this summer, mentioned to me once that one of the biggest reasons people didn't show up on time to her workshops was that they did not have watches, clocks, or any other way to tell time. So they would just have to guess when to leave for the workshop. Some would show up a half an hour early, some on time, and some a half an hour late. If you think about it, being just a half an hour off without any time telling device is pretty good.

 

I put myself through a little thought experiment. If I had no way to tell time, how would I have any idea when I should leave for a workshops that started at two o'clock in the afternoon? I guess I might leave after lunch. But when does lunch happen? When I get hungry, I suppose. Most people here have daily routines, so I suppose that on most days lunch - and pretty much everything else - happens at about the same time. So if they ever figure out what time they tend to finish lunch, they then can judge off of that.

 

While I continue to be impressed that people without watches can manage to only be fifteen minutes late, fifteen minutes late is still just no good when you are running a class that is only two hours and you have planned on using every minute of that two hours. The first week of PACE workshops I tried to pay close attention to when people were arriving. It was much as Aria had described. Everyone trickled sometime between twenty minutes before two o'clock and twenty minutes after. The people who came closest to being right on time were the people who had watches.

 

So last week when I went to Solwezi, the nearest big town where people can buy items that are imported cheaply, I bought watches for all the participants. I got them at about seventy five cents a piece after bargaining with several different salesmen in the market. They are your typical black, plastic sports watches except that they all flash "I love you" on the screen every couple seconds. You have to love them back.

 

As soon as I gave them out on Tuesday, everyone was asking me what time I had in order to get the correct time on their watches. One of the things I love about here is how time often seems to be such a lax thing; being late is the norm rather than the exception. Yet, when people do have watches, they synch them with the time on the radio religiously. If they meet someone else with a watch, they often compare times to see if they are the same. If someone asks you what time it is and it is 7:27, "It's about 7:30," is NOT an acceptable answer. You must tell the person the exact time.

 

I've only had two classes since I gave the watches to the participants, but only two people have been late since then. One was a man who came in, looked at his watch, and noted that it was two minutes past the hour. The second was a Zambian woman today who had gone to Solwezi to vote in the national elections. Everyone else came within the ten minutes before class. Starting class on time is a wonderful thing. It was definitely worth the seventy-five cents per person.