How I've Changed

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"You must have changed"

Changed? Me? Really? You think?

Just a few minutes ago I was bumping along, riding in the back of what was my last trip in the back of a maize filled pickup truck, going from a Zambian village into town, overstuffed with people and goats, one of which had a lazy eye and was nicely nuzzling into my lap and chewing on a maize sack trying to score himself an early lunch.

One of the farmers beside me had started asking me the basic questions that typify most common Zambian conversations: How are you? Where you were going? Where were you coming from? What church do you belong to?

But after hearing that I was going to be leaving Africa after being here for 3.5 years, he hit me with a reflective question that was very out of the ordinary. "You must have changed? (the 'How?' implied)" The question startled me as it wasn't a typical question you would expect from a farmer. Drawing a blank, I tried to buy some time buy asking him what he meant. I learned that he had gone to South Africa to work in the mines for 15 years and had only returned to his original home in Zambia (back in the 90's) to find that things were very different. He said that at first, he was mad that everything in Zambia had changed and wasn't as good as when he left. He blamed the government. But it wasn't until he blew up and viciously fought with his brother and ended up kicking him out of his house, that he realised that it wasn't as much Zambia that had changed, but it was him.

"Everyone thinks of the changing of the world, but no one thinks of the changing within himself."

I didn't know how to answer the question. He stared at me patiently, attentive, awaiting some sort of response…… I had nothing

"AHH AHH AAAGGHHH!"

My eyes shoot down between my legs only to see my crotch being chewed in towards the mouth of the goat. It seems he had mistakenly interpreted my pants as another maize sack he could score food out of. I jolted up and started trying to shake hips to stop him from taking a chunk out of my future children. The people in the truck started yelling and the driver instantly swerved the vehicle and hit the breaks causing it to halt. Luckily for me, the sudden jolt has caused the goat, and unfortunately the other passengers, to fly forward and topple over each other into the cab of the truck.

I inspected the damage.

Pants…destroyed, other important bits…..scared, but fine, goat….. upside down, passengers…….moderately angry, but more at the goat then me.

The Novella Begins

Hello family, friends, colleagues of early and late,

Yes, it is true. I am finally leaving Africa and coming back to Canada. Some of you might know this already, others probably didn’t even realise I have been living in Zambia and Malawi and working with Engineers Without Borders here for 3.5 years. I don't think I have written one of my novella mass emails like this for 2.5 of those years and I apologize to those who have been missing them (and a 'your welcome' to those who hate large mass emails).

I have just finished my last few days visiting 2 farmer friends of mine who are living in villages around the first town I lived in when I worked here, Choma. The two tell very different stories.

A Tale of Two Farmers

Hope

Derek Muchimba lived and worked in the village of Impongwe with his family of two wives and 13 children (8 of his own, 5 are relatives or orphans). Derek was the first farmer I ever met in Zambia.

It stared over 3 years ago when I had first arrived in Choma. I had finished a very intensive EWB training where we spent a lot of time analysing why most development workers who come from Western countries aren't as effective as they could or need to be (some being completely analytical and focusing on the problem as if it was out of a text book and not understanding the realities of the local culture, others coming with big hearts and great intentions, but not thinking pragmatically or being able to make hard 'business' decisions that are necessary might not be inclusive of everyone). I was hell bent on not being either of these types and I was tested on my very first day in Choma.

Derek was one of the farmers my organisation was working with. He had bought one of our irrigation pumps on a loan basis and he had missed his final date for paying back the loan. It was my job to go collect it from him (which was very important because it instills a sense of investment and ownership with the pump, where as if it was given for free, it would be seen more as charity and probably not valued). I was going into collecting this loan like a hungry leopard hunting an impala (deer-ish).

So, on my first day, I started out on my motorbike with my co-worker Joshua to go 'return with the prey'. We were half-way to his village when Joshua spotted Derek coming in on his bicycle and we stopped. Derek was younger then I thought and looked a little anguished. There was a stack of cabbages on the back of the bike and a wrapped bunch of blankets in his lap. We approached Derek and I started right into the conversation, building the relationship and trying to earn trust with him by greeting him and introducing myself in his local language, Tonga. We greeted and he laughed at how I had used his language. But then the hunt began. I saw the cabbage and commented on how the pump must be really working well and helping him grow lots of cabbage (slyly leading him in). He looked at it and said the pump was working great and he was very happy the cabbage was coming out and how they would be at full maturity in about 2 weeks. I then mentioned how he must be earning a good deal of money selling all that cabbage at the market in town (leading him towards the trap), he responded that these were the first ones he was going to sell but hoped they would fetch a good price. I then started into how he still owes money for the pump and that this cabbage would be a great way to start to pay for it (and in for the kill)….. But right before I delivered the last line, I got distracted by a itty bitty adorable, but sickly looking face popping out of the blankets on his lap…. I paused.

'Who's that?'

'Ahh, this is my daughter, she has fallen very sick with Malaria. We tried to treat it in the village with local medicine, but this didn't work. I had to pull out these cabbages early so I can sell them in town to get enough money to pay for her medication. She is very sick. Her name is Precious (actual name, no word of a lie, picture attached).

I crumbled. From a fierce roaring predator into a timid mewing kitten in less then a second. I didn't even mention the loan. I just scrambled around holding onto Derek trying to get him back on the bike, then changing my mind and dragging him towards my motorbike and offering to give him a ride into town, and then him saying it would take too long to switch the cabbage over to the bike and he would be faster if I just let released his arm and ride his own bike. I let go. He sped off into town.

Needless to say, when I returned home, I felt like I deserved to be sent all the way back home to Canada. Who was I to think I to could be different from most everyone else who came here 'trying' to help. I was just going to be another well intentioned Canadian who let his heart get in the way of actually doing what was needed.

Luckily, I had my superhero-like Zambian co-worker Joshua there to coach me through it. And with lots of help from Joshua, throughout my time in Choma, we took on Derek as a bit of a special project. Now, 3 years since that first interaction, he is one of the top farmers in the area. After my first botched attempt, Joshua had convinced my to return back to see Derek. When we met up, we found out that he had been able to sell the cabbage and get the medicine, and Precious was partially recovered and looking more lively. At that time, I got to know Derek a lot better ,and although he didn't know much, you could tell that he was a hard worker and had an entrepreneurial knack about him.

This past year, despite heavy flooding which has destroyed most farmers maize (corn) crops and left them vulnerable and very short on food. Derek, who also had his maize crop destroyed, had shifted his focus to intensive vegetable growing using the pump and has already started selling his produce in town to earn money to buy food this year. On top of that, his wives, cousins, and eldest son are also using the pump to make their own money for the year to be able to send the whole bunch of kids to school.

More importantly Derek has become the model farmer that we had hoped for. He has become the local treadle pump expert who everyone comes to for assistance. He charges other farmers small fees to repair their treadle pumps. He gives free demonstrations and lessons to farmers looking to buy a treadle pump and he informs them of where to buy them in town. A highlight was during one of the times we were working with Derek to train other farmers in the area, and Derek told me "David, I am no longer a farmer, starting today, I am a manager" . And that is what he has become. Through the years, we have become great friends and I was ecstatic last year when I got to bring both my good friends (Keith and Morgan) and my parents to come and meet him when they visited me.

Despair

Now I could just end the happy story there with everything in Zambia being alright and all my work being great. But that would be far from the truth. Not all my work was so helpful. During my last week here, I visited another farmer I had been working with early on in my stay. Prudence was a widowed mother of 6 who I also had hoped would become a model treadle pump farmer in her area. I had met Prudence in town when she was selling some of her produce. We started chatting and I quickly assessed her as being very sharp and confident. I asked her about her vegetables and learned she was just using a bucket to water them (perfect person for starting another treadle pump program). I pitched the treadle pump to her and even though she resisted at first, saying she wasn't very good with machines. I promised her that if she purchased one, it would change her life.

I started working with Prudence, and quickly confirmed my character assessment, adding hard working, charismatic, and a natural leader to her profile. I was convinced that she would be a leader in her community who would be able to rally the other people to buy and use the treadle pumps and then bulk their vegetables together to make transport back to town much cheaper. What I didn't take into account, was that her village was much further away from town and getting their vegetables to the market took a lot longer and was much more costly. Her community also had a lot of internal political issues going on with the village head man always exerting his power over other people in the community.

When I visited Prudence, her maize field looked decrepit. I asked about how the treadle pump was doing and she looked at me shyly and with a bit of despair. Her pump had broken down and she hadn't been able to figure out how to fix it. The trip into town to get spare parts was expensive and both times they had tried to do it earlier, there weren't any parts in stock. The other 6 farmers in the area who had pumps were looking to her for help in fixing their pumps too, but since she couldn't find the parts and wasn't great at fixing them, all of them had put their pumps on their roofs and they all lay idle. She also cited how the other farmers weren't interested in working together on selling their vegetables in bulk (which would have reduced transport costs). I couldn't help but feel responsible, as it was me who convinced her to buy the pump, me who didn't understand ahead of time that her community probably wasn't going to be an ideal one for being able to take care of the pump, and me who even pushed her to try to rally the community together, only now to have her with less social status then as if I had never gotten involved.

All Too Common a Story

These stories tell a clear tale of my past 3.5 years.

With the right people, external conditions, thoughtfulness, hard work, and luck, certain development interventions can be extremely successful and sustainable. However, if any of these ingredients doesn't fall into place, the chances of failure rise significantly. I have realised that despite my best efforts and intentions, I have very little control over the circumstances of most people and it is quite naïve to feel that I can control how things play out.

The Peanut Butter with the Chocolate -aka The Good with the Bad (I hate chocolate)

As the Director of EWBs Southern African program, my last 2 years have been quite different then my first 1.5, where I spent much of my time engaging with rural farmers, living on less then $5/day, and truly living an average Zambian lifestyle. My recent years tell a much less romantic story of myself more as a organisational consultant and a program manager. Over my time here, I've ended up overseeing , managing, and coaching 56 different EWB volunteers and staff; met with hundreds of government, non-government, and private sector development organisations; and initiated partnerships and consulted with 47 of them, spread all over Zambia and Malawi.

The lifestyle was hard. Check that, more accurate words would be (as often brought up by others in EWB) 'daunting', 'tedious' and 'completely ridiculous'.

A typical week for me involved 90 hours of work, with over 30 hrs of it traveling on rickety broken down transport, never spending more then a few days a month in the same place. In a single day, I would have to transition between working on my laptop in a powerless mud hut; to holding conference calls with people across Africa while riding on the back of a bicycle taxi in the middle of the night; to holding formal business meetings and organisational consultations with 40 and 50 year old highly experienced professionals; to coaching EWB staff members for hours on end on a range of areas from how to help a rural farmer start a profitable processing factory to helping to develop a curriculum for the new Science and Technology University in Malawi.

Why would anyone choose to live such a lifestyle?

Because the work was fantastic! Everyday I got to organise partnerships with and consult for some of the best and most inspiring development programs going on in the countries. I got to spend time engaging with inspiring African community leaders, entrepreneurs and people who are going to develop this continent. I was privileged to learn from and work together to solve extremely tough and complex problems with the best group of people I have ever worked with, members of EWB. EWB uses the phrase 'humble entrepreneurs' to describe the type of person it attracts and I think it perfectly fits well. But only if you also attach on the words passionate, intelligent, pragmatic, and inspiring as well (although we often joke around using the term 'insecure over-achiever' which come to think of it, also kind of embodies those words as well)

Proud, Dissatisfied, Determined

Proud

We have done a lot during our time here. And I must admit, above all the specific projects we have run, partners we have helped improve, and people we have helped grow, the thing I am most proud of from my time here, is how our team has built up Engineers Without Borders. Being in a job where one of my main objectives was to analyse and be very critical of other organisations, I got to understand what really makes up impactful organisations and what doesn't. I was able to compare EWB to all these other organisations and compared to what I saw, EWB has something special going for it.

EWB is an organisation that not only is having substantial impact in Africa today, but is set up to take off and evolve into what I believe will be a world leading organisation in helping facilitate the improvement of the development sector.

We started off only basing ourselves in rural areas, working in villages communities. But now, on top of still working with those rural communities, EWB people are working with multi-million dollar NGO's, doing business consulting for large agri-business companies, organising the development of a university and even working to help coordinate country wide donor strategies. This is completely due to EWB being able to assemble teams of these tremendous people and working with local people to make ideas of positive change a reality.

One of the best parts of my job, was being able to just show up and meet with one of our partner organisations and glean the compliments from dozens of our African partners who've been doing this work for the past 20-40 years, and have them say, 'we've never come across such a unique organisation who can consistently produce such great people'.

Dissatisfied

However, despite being so proud of what we have done, I also must admit that I am also leaving dissatisfied. I am not so naive to believe that poverty would have been solved in my time overseas. It is actually quite far from that situation. Visiting the village this time around, I realised that compared to when I first arrived, my 'romantic Africa village' blinders were not shining as brightly. Yes, some people are still very happy despite the abject poverty they live in and have a tremendous outlook on life that is very admirable (and a lesson for many of us). However a great deal more (based only on my own opinion)are suffering greatly, and are overall quite un-happy, especially women.

Oddly, there is something even more dissatisfying. Something that plagues me even more then the people in the villages without enough food to eat or the women who have what seems to be the hardest working lives in the world. See, other then how he is more intelligent, hard working, passionate, and committed then me, my co-worker and friend, Joshua, we are virtually identical (I think I'm more funny though). We are virtually identical, other then one thing. He was the unlucky one to be born in Zambia. Joshua still struggles to scrape by living in the capital city Lusaka and to keep his family fed in order to pay to continue to invest in his future and go to university (by correspondence as he still works full time and takes care of the family at the same time). While I, can very easily go back home to Canada for a few years, step into a $60,000 a year job and then go get a masters degree and even come back and potentially become his boss. In my mind, this is a tremendous injustice. Just because he is Zambian.

I leave here with this tainted feeling inside of me.

Determined

I am not finished.

I stand by my earlier comment about not being able to control the situation. However, I feel….actually, I know, that there are NGO programs, government departments, and businesses that are less controlling and more learning and adaptive. There are African leaders, entrepreneurs, and farmers who are creative and determined. And I've been blessed in my time here to have worked with these types of organisations and people, and I've seen them create positive change. It is them that will lead Africa into the future.

My career in international development is far from over. There is so much opportunity and so much will out there, that it would be not only morally but also financially irresponsible, not to stay involved. From a historical standpoint, things are still very early for Africa in terms of being in a position to actually independently develop. Both Zambian and Malawi have maturing multi-party democracies, completely peaceful histories, limited corruption, and have experienced continuous economic growth in their economies over the past few years, despite very poor external conditions. There is money to be made, and money to be earned in this continent.

But as for now, I am entering another stage in my life. I am extremely excited to be coming home and spend some time investing and contributing to family and friends who I have spent so little time with over the past while.

In terms of work, between June and Sept, I am going to be moving back to Calgary and doing short-term consulting for EWB to try and transition a lot of the knowledge I have accumulated and help them build some of their internal organisational systems. After that, I am looking for jobs that will help me develop and learn about innovative business systems. I haven't figured out what that exactly looks like yet. But I am definitely going to be in Canada and investing in building up my skills and experience so the next time I return, I will be able to add even more value. This could be in the form of working with a company involved in creating innovative products or offering value added services, or it could be in business and management consulting where I would be able to learn about a broad range of different types of companies. If you have any advice or ideas, I would love to hear them.

I am also very excited about the prospect of living in the same city as my girlfriend for the first time in over 5 years. Many of you might not know this, but I have found myself an absolutely wonderful (but disarmingly clever) gal named Robin, who was also with Engineers Without Borders. We are both going to be moving back to Canada (she's been in Africa for almost 3 years as well) and figuring out what a relationship looks like when you see the person for more then a week every 4 months (any tips or ideas here as well would be very much appreciated).

It has been a great 3.5 years and I know that I will thoroughly cherish them as some of the most formative in my life. I sincerely want to thank everyone for your support throughout this time. It hasn't been easy for a lot of people, you don't know how much I appreciate it.

Change

How have I changed? Well, I'm not exactly sure, but according to the farmer on the truck, I probably won't really know until I've returned home for some time and booted my brother out of the house (hah, see yah later Steve). But to be honest, I'm not exactly sure how I've changed, and I admit, that I'm a bit scared to find out. But as scared as I might feel, I do know that I'm going to be with people who I know will be there to help me (and themselves) to figure it out together.

With love,

David

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