Kasongo and the Broken Shoe

One year ago I bought some shoes for my impending departure to Zambia.  I bought Merrell sandals that looked like shoes.  They had the Vibram soles and everything.  I thought they would last a long time. 

Maybe it's the miles I've walked, poor construction, a year of use, or the African terrain, but they weren't going to make it much longer. 

That was until Kasongo Fubisha, my neighbor, saw them in need of repair and told me that he could fix them.  I gave him the shoe, not expecting much, and he proceeded to start putting them back together.  I gave him the shoe not expecting much, but when he returned it less than thirty minutes later it was good as new.  All he used was about 25 minutes, some pieces of string, a piece of metal to push the string, and another with a hooked end to pull it out the other side. 

I am not joking when I say that the craftsmanship was good too.  Two and a half weeks later and the mends are still strong, still binding my sole to the shoe, and I don't have to get new shoes now.  

The two things I learned from this were that no shoes can last in Africa, and a villager with minimal supplies and / or tools can right all the wrongs of a broken shoe in under thirty minutes.  

Some Village Innovation

Innovation is bred from necessity I thought.  As it turns out, it is also bred from laziness (in my case), through mimicry, and, as I mentioned above, through necessity.  Here are three examples of innovation that I've come across in the village.  

The first is my beloved bike plow.  Made from an old bicycle frame, fitted with a locally made plow, and pushed (not pedaled) the bike plow in some cases can make cultivating a field 75% faster.  That means a task that may take 2 days can be completed in about 4 hours.  This is not only great for time management and efficiency, but the conventional method of using a hoe is tiresome on a back - the plow allows the user to stand straight up.  

So far people are very excited about this new innovation and if only a couple people out of the 100+ that have seen it use it then I'll be really happy and content.

Showing the bike plow to some local farmers and village headmen.

This next one was amazing to come across.  It's a rain water harvest system that then acts as a flush toilet - something I had never seen in the village.  Here's how this one works:

Water runs off the roof, into a gutter and then slides down into a water holding tank.  The villager comes with a pale, transfers the water to an elevated tank where it sits until a user flushed the toilet inside the brick structure.  I've never seen or even heard of anything like this before.  This is maybe my favorite example of village innovation.

The water moves off the roof, into the gutter and down into the vertical tank.  Water is then transferred to the horizontal, elevated tank and used in the flushing process.  The toilet is in the brick structure.

My third example is something that can even be done in America.  It's called manure tea and it's a smelly, wonderful idea.  Using water, a mesh like bag full of animal manure and a few days of soaking, this mixture can provide gardeners with nutrient-rich water for use on their crops.  Although hard to "scale  up" and use in large-scale fields, it's easy to create and implement in the garden.  

Because fertilizer here is very expensive for villagers to buy, this method allows farmers to use materials that are commonly found around their homes and villages: water, manure from the livestock they keep, and a simple water container.

PCV Caleb Rudow and PC Staffer Henry Chilufya hold up a manure tea bag that a local health clinic was using to supplement their crops' needs for nutrients.

I'll keep adding different innovations that I find throughout the next few months.  It's so interesting to see and be apart of, because in America we often go to a store to solve our issues, but here creativity is king due to a lack of resources, like stores and money.

Prepping for Training

I've just finished working with a big group of Peace Corps staffers and fellow PCVs on preparations for this year's newest addition to Peace Corps Zambia: the 2013 LIFE (Linking Income, Food, and the Environment - my program) group, which will arrive in just a few short days.  I'm no longer apart of the young group, now my group (which arrived last February) is the veteran intake.  Hard to believe that it has been a year already.

For two weeks we worked on the schedule for the three month long training, the new technical manual that the trainees will receive, and every other little part and piece that needs to be in place before the trainees arrive - as well as the details that need attention so that their three month long training can be completed with as few problems as possible. 

And let me tell you, it has been a LOT of work, but it's been great and I'm actually very sad to have these past two weeks end.  For me, I got to write quite a bit of the new technical manual (it covers gardening, farming, forestry, and resource conservation), as well as editing and formatting the other parts that made the cut from last year's version.  It sounds tedious and boring - maybe it is, I spent four 11-hour days straight working on it - but it didn't even feel like work.  If there is any trait that I can point to and say, "That absolutely came from my Mom" it would be how much I like combing through documents for typos and grammatical mistakes.  (I know my blog can be full of them, but it's Africa... it happens).

And maybe the best part is that I got to work with two of the best Peace Corps Volunteers that Zambia has serving it right now: Caleb Rudow and Hannah Lippe.  These two are two of my closest friends here and being with them for two weeks added to the enjoyment of the preparation.  It seemed more like a vacation than detail-driven work, so, again, I'm sad to have it end and not be able to spend such good, quality time with these two.

Myself, Hannah, and Caleb

But, it's all done now.  Everything from the new trainees first day in country to their homestay families, to the content that they'll be learning and training on all of the way through to swearing-in when they'll become PCVs themselves is set in place. 

Caleb (the white guy in the patterned shirt) teaches homestay host
 families how to use a "tippy tap" to promote better food preparation hygiene to avoid making trainees sick.

That isn't the end for me though.  Nope.  In April I will head back to the training center - near Chipembi, Zambia - and have the chance to teach as a technical trainer for the entire month.  If that month-long training goes anything like the past two weeks then I won't have any problems enjoying my time.