Romantic Zambia: Becoming a woman for a day The purpose of this day was for me to start to get a bit of a feel for some of the typical tasks that a woman in Zambia does everyday. Just as how it takes an enormous amount of time and effort to deeply integrate fully into a culture, it also will take a lot more then spending a single day doing a few tasks that women do everyday to really understand what their lives are like. Nonetheless, it was to be a first step and if nothing else at least I would [View Full Entry]

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Well, it’s been almost a month since I last wrote and since I have arrived here in this small town named Choma, my home. It has been a crazy month of new experiences, wonderful new friends and now highly raised expectations. Choma is a town located on the main southern Zambian highway, linking the two big centers of Lusaka and Livingstone. Upon first sight, the town doesn’t seem like much, there is one major street with a couple of food shops, a couple of banks and a couple of small businesses. However, despite its initial quiet small-town appearance, after staying here [View Full Entry]

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Journal Entry 3: Life in Livingstone So after my two weeks of training in Mazabuka I was off to the tourist capital of Zambia, Livingstone. I have been there for the past two weeks again learning about opeating a development field office after which I've come back to the capital, Lusaka, for a final debrief. Finally, tomorrow I will be off to my home, the small town where I will be living, working, and reporting to you for the majority of my time here, Choma. Livingstone is the tourist capital of Zambia for a reason. It is home to one [View Full Entry]

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Development Point: Sleeping With the Enemy AAAHHHH CHHHUUUU! I wildly awoke myself from my deep slumber with a giant sneeze. I pondered for a second on why it was so dry in the air around me. It only took a second to shake off my sleepy haze to remember that it was the 1600 - 25kg bags of mealie meal that I was sharing this little house with. Mealie meal is the flour like ground up maize powder used in making Zambia’s staple food, Nsima. The reason there were 1600 bags of mealie meal in my house wasn’t because I [View Full Entry]

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So, despite my attempts to try and enlighten people about the side of Africa that isn’t typically heard or seen, there are some things here that are heard about that are pretty damn amazing. Definitely one of the most spiritually profound and energy uplifting experiences I’ve ever had was standing directly in front of the 1700m long, over100m high, beautifully magnificent Victoria falls. Just standing there you can feel as if the power of the 33 million cubic meters of water per second slamming down on the rocks below is slamming into your very bones. You just stand there with y [View Full Entry]

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Mwabonwa Bwenzuma - ‘Greetings Friends’ in Tonga It is update time again and I must say that I’ve really enjoyed my inaugural first Zambian weeks in Lusaka. It has offered me an initial comparative illustration between the very different lifestyles afforded by people in this humbly sprawling city. I saw and met people living what is termed here as “the high life”, afforded by a very small percentage of Zambian politicians, government officials and business people driving around in Mercedes Benz’s wearing Rolex watches. I lived and worked with many people [View Full Entry]

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Twambo Time: David Muunga Steve, Simon and myself spent a crazy day biking out into the bush in an attempt to get to a farmers group meeting we had organized. It had just rained two days before (the first day it’s really rained since I’ve been here, which I’ll talk more about later) and many of the dirt paths we were weaving through were still quite muddy. Because the rains had been so heavy two days prior, one of the small ‘streams’ that we were supposed to cross had turned into more of a medium sized river. There wasn’t too much [View Full Entry]

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Development Point: Urban Migration A major issue in the many developing world countries is something called urban migration. This is basically when massive amounts of people living in the rural areas can’t find work, mainly on the farms, and believe that if they move to the big city they will be able to somehow find work so they can send the money they earn back home for their families. The problem, is that most of the time, this idea of more jobs in the city is just a false perception and the people end up not being able to find work, [View Full Entry]

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Development Point: Motivations of NGO workers I know that one of the biggest shocks for me when I started getting involved with development work and when I went to India, was that a lot of the time, the people working in your NGO were mainly there because it was a just a job. This came as a huge surprise to me because my perception back in Canada was that everyone who worked for NGO’s was there because they really deeply cared about positively contributing to helping people and making some necessary sacrifices to do so. However, after arriving in these developing [View Full Entry]

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Development Point: Leadership Development and Peer Education In my opinion, having outsiders coming into the village, whether it’s workers from developed countries or local NGO workers who live in the city, isn’t as effective in terms of educating groups on a broad scale as having someone from inside their social network educating them instead. From my observations and experience, a teaching technique called peer-education, is one of the most effective ways of facilitating behavioural change. This is based on the idea that people are much more willing to make changes [View Full Entry]

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