Jordan Blekking still has work to do in Zambia

Written by Chuck Carlson in the Battle Creek Enquirer

He remembers the girl who was born the first night he arrived in the village. Six months later, she was dead.

Jordan Blekking pauses as he talks about the Zambian child, whose name he did not know, whose parents he did not know, whose story he did not know.

But he knows enough.

“When a kid dies, it’s hard to move past it,” said Blekking, who was back in Battle Creek last week taking a two-week break from his Peace Corps service in the Central African country. “You wonder, ‘What could I have done?’”

He felt it even more keenly because the little girl died of something that, in the developed world, could have been treated. And he felt it because he had suffered with it himself.

“I got really sick drinking the water because I forgot to filter it,” he said. “I was on the floor. It was terrible.”

But he was able to receive medicine from the Peace Corps and he said after four or five days he was feeling fine. When he returned to the village, he learned the little girl had died.

“And she had the same thing,” he said, shaking his head.

Blekking has been in Zambia since February 2012 and this assignment won’t finish until next April.

But these are the stories he’s heard a thousand times from a thousand places and he’s already decided that, if he has the opportunity, he’s likely going to stay on for another year.

Here a grandfather, Abel Sandonji, and his grandson show me how they used a small loan from a local women's group to buy a water pump, hoses, and attachments in order to irrigate their tomato garden.  I still love working with go-getters like this.

“I have to decide what I’m interested in,” he said. “But I’m leaning toward staying. It’s such a great place. It’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.”

Blekking, a Pennfield High and Michigan State grad, is a specialist in environmental services. He also occasionally writes a column for the Enquirer about his experiences in Zambia and the villagers are thrilled when they receive copies of the stories, laminating them and placing them on the walls of their huts.

His service in the Zambia village of Makiya has been the eye-opening experience he always expected it would be.

“I’m so used to living in that village that I don’t realize how different it really is,” he said. “It’s the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.”

The lows? It’s watching a community struggle to scratch out a living every day and looking for ways to find the basic comforts most of us don’t even think about.

“Enough clothes, safe drinking water, power,” Blekking said. “In the capital city of Lusaka the power goes out all the time because they don’t have the infrastructure.”

The highs? He can name a thousand of those too, but Mr. Nshimbi seems to top his list.

Mr. Nshimbi, in the foreground, is one of the hardest working people I've ever  met or worked with.  He's just a great dude on all fronts.

He is a villager who wanted to improve his life and help his village too, so he asked Jordan to help him create a fish pond that would provide food and income.

Other villagers said they were interested as well, but when it came time to actually do the work, only Mr. Nshimbi showed up.

Told the project could take months to complete, Mr. Nshimbi, with help from his brother, finished it in a month.

But when it came time to fill the pond with fish, Mr. Nshimbi didn’t have the money, so Jordan donated $20 to buy the fingerlings. More than half the fish died in transit and even with all the setbacks, today Mr. Nshimbi has more than 700 fish in his pond and is looking to build another.

“He’s worked so hard,” Blekking said. “He knows that fish translates to money and money translates to a better way of life. He’s done a really good job.”

Blekking sees these little victories every day though he also admits much of the work he’s doing won’t come to fruition until long after he’s left the area.

“But that fish pond, that’s tangible,” he said. “I can touch it.”

Blekking returned to Zambia Saturday, taking an arduous flight from Detroit to Chicago to London to Lusaka and then a 14-hour bus ride back to his village.

But he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“It will be hard to pass up good roads, electricity, ESPN, cold drinks,” he said. “But I still have work to do.”

Tour de Soltown

Recently my good friend Ryan and I tried to ride from out district (Mufumbwe) to Solwezi (our province's capital) on our Trek mountain bikes.  It's a distance of about 265 kms or 165 miles. 

The plan was to leave really early in the morning, ride 90 kms to another volunteer's site and then stay there for the night.  The next morning we would leave even earlier, ride all day long, and arrive sometime in the early evening in 

The trip began well enough.  The first day wasn't too bad, really.  We made the 90 kms with only one mishap, which was a flat tire on my bike.  We took our time and 6 hours (this includes the tire repair time) after leaving my house we arrived in Nyansonso Village to stay with our neighboring volunteer.

Ryan and I on the first morning of our ride.

The second day was not so pretty.  About 30 minutes in I realized, even before the sun came up, that my legs were not in shape for this.  The entire month before my ride I was at the Peace Corps training center as a technical trainer for the new group of Peace Corps Volunteers that had just come to Zambia.  This means that I ate a lot of food and did very little in the way of exercise, although I did do a lot of exercising my mind by answering as many of their questions as I could.

Ryan about 2 hours into what would be our 10 hours of riding on the second day.  After this picture was taken we discussed if we could really even make it all of the way to Solwezi.

We rode and rode and rode some more.  Each time we thought we were getting near to a landmark we recognized we'd find out we weren't where we thought we were.  After each turn was a longer straight away than before, and, of course, it seemed like we had a headwind the whole day.  There wasn't any let up from the road either - it was one long, continual incline.

Ten hours later we reached Mumena - about 55 kms from Solwezi.  By this point we were exhausted and with another two to three hours, if not more, of riding remaining we called it quits.  We threw our bikes onto a truck and hitched the rest of the way into Solwezi.  We never made it.

But, we did a good amount of it.  In two days we rode about 210 kms (130 miles).  Even without finishing it I think we did a good, long distance.  

We were both exhausted.  Hitting the physical wall of exhaustion over and over and over again wasn't enjoyable.  In Mumena a man asked me, "Are you doing this for a fundraiser?"  I replied, "We were doing this for fun... it's not fun anymore."  

Maybe people will say, "Yeah that's a lot, but you still didn't do it."  To them I say, "I don't care.  We tried."  

Looking back my ambition to go the whole length in two days (Ryan wanted to do it in three) was far too ambitious, but we went for it, and for that I'm happy we tried.

The Chipolopolo Boys of Zambia

Some of North-Western Province's volunteers supporting the Chipolopolo Boys

The Chipolopolo Boys are the darlings of Zambia. This group of men makes up Zambia’s national football (soccer) team.

In the United States we don’t have anything that quite compares to this group or the love of this group by the entire nation. Instead, maybe an aggregate of a bunch of teams, some real and some fictitious, may suffice to allow understanding. Here’s the best that I could come up with.

Take the marketability of the New York Yankees — it seems like everyone has some Chipolopolo apparel; add the spunk of the Hickory Huskers from the movie Hoosiers and the geographic mystery of a team like the Golden State Warriors and which city are they actually in (most people have no idea where Zambia is on a map).

And finally the champion’s attitudes of the Chicago Bulls from the Michael Jordan years — the players have extremely high confidence in themselves. And that about sums up Zambia’s national team.

Even though Chipolopolo is mostly unknown abroad, this has started to change due to recent events — in 2012 they won the African Cup of Nations (AFCON) and became the best of the African continent’s 58 teams.

Zambia had never been the champion before until last year’s win, in penalty kicks, over a much more highly touted Ivory Coast squad. The only other time they were considered to even have a chance was in 1993 but, sadly, that team never had the opportunity to compete.

While on their way to a World Cup qualifying match, just months before the AFCON tournament, their plane crashed just off the coast of Gabon — where the 2012 team would eventually play for the championship — killing a majority of the team’s players, coaches and staff,

An investigation determined that pilot fatigue and error led to the tragedy. However, a new team was quickly assembled and, inspired by the tragedy, managed to reach the finals. But it fell short to Nigeria and had to settle for second place.

That tragic loss still resonates with Zambians. It garners a similar reaction as Pearl Harbor did with my grandparents’ generation, JFK’s death with my parents’ and the attacks of Sept. 11 with mine: everyone remembers where they were when they first heard the news.

Chipolopolo!

The 2012 team, made up of seemingly smaller than average, yet highly talented players, made its way through the field of competitors before reaching the semifinals and a highly ranked West African team in Ghana.

They won 1-0 over Ghana, and then faced Ivory Coast from the same soccer powerhouse region of West Africa. Zambia won that game in dramatic fashion by outshooting the Black Stars of Ghana, 8-7, on penalty kicks, and became the kings of Africa.

Last month, many of the 2012 Chipolopolo squad returned to play games against Sudan and Lesotho during the qualification round for the 2014 World Cup in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

And I couldn’t wait. Watching a game with the locals is great. When a shot is taken, it seems as if all the air in the room is swept away due to everyone inhaling and holding their collective breath. If that shot is a miss, then it becomes a scene of “what ifs” and “he should haves.” But, when the shot is on its mark and goes in — it’s pandemonium.

If there is no television then the village’s radios are crowded around and the only noise heard is static-infused voices from the announcers. I imagine it was like the old days my grandfather told me about at his family’s farm in Indiana with everyone crowding around radios and every listener being enraptured by the play-by-play.

Unfortunately, Zambia’s World Cup chances hang by a thread after a 1-1 tie against the Sudan in mid June. But while the country awaits its fate for the prestigious event, Zambia this week will host the COFASA Cup, which features teams from southern Africa. So soccer fever will continue.

In the end, though, all Zambians love the Chipolopolo Boys. Whether they win or lose really doesn’t matter because they’re going to be adored no matter the outcome.