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.”