Page 2 of DavidDamberger Travel Blog Posts
Basankwa, Basankwa!
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 So, my day as a woman awoke with the sunrise. Then grabbing my little bundle of straw, I swept out all the dirt out from inside my house and then swept all that dirt away ... read more
Home
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 for only a month and peeling back a few layers, I’ve discovered that there’s a hidden energy within the city that makes for a very interesting life. The first thing to do after arriving in ... read more
A Zambian Lady Fishing on Lake Kariba
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 of the most spectacular sights in the entire world, Victoria Falls. Not to be outdone, it is also home to a whole range of wildlife viewing opportunities and extreme sports such as white water rafting ... read more
Is David stealing food aid?
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 was well versed in Zambian economics and I had purchased a decades supply of it knowing that the looming drought will cause the food prices to skyrocket in a couple months. That would only be ... read more
Victoria Falls!
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 your arms wide open, a huge smile on your face, getting absolutely soaked to the skin by all the whirling mist. Everywhere you look you see rainbows and in some areas you can even see a ... read more
Lost in Maize
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 in a still relatively small group who could be termed the middle class of whom I would say the majority of my NGO co-workers fit in. And I spoke with and spent a few days with people in the overwhelmingly large group of people who ... read more
David Muunga and his Son
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 of a risk to us from the river because it wasn’t flowing too hard, but there was a risk that the bikes could have been caught by the current and because of the pressure on ... read more
Using a Treadle Pump
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, and if they do, is usually very inconsistent, strenuous, and many times illegal. Hundreds of thousands of these migrants end up congregating in areas just outside the city, building makeshift cardboard, sheet metal, and concrete ... read more
Steve and Simon Hard at Work
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 world countries you start to see that development NGO’s are very similar to any regular business company. Many times, the people they employ, both local and ex-pats, are more interested in just doing whatever it ... read more
Peer Education in Action
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 in their lives if someone of whom they association themselves with closely is able to make the same change in their lives. The traditional development way of teaching, having ‘experts’ come in and explain information to the local people, isn’t as effective because development workers, whether ... read more
