Romantic Zambia - “Holy Crap, I’m in Africa!” On one of the first days that I was out in the field in Mazabuka, I definitely had one of those “Holy Crap! I’m in Africa and this is amazing” romantic moments. We were travelling through one of the very secluded small Tongan villages on our way back late in the day from a busy schedule conducting meetings with farmers. Steve, and I stopped to speak with one final farmer to see why he hadn’t attended one of the meetings before we headed home. Steve and the farmer were speaking in Tonga and [View Full Entry]

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My journey begun not in Zambia, but in Canada for three intense weeks of preparation. One week in Vancouver for the Engineers Without Borders conference and two weeks in Toronto. During this time, I went through a mind expanding overseas development training course. Now, although I had already had taken courses in development studies in University, personally studied and taught development at the EWB Calgary chapter for 3 years, and went through a one week EWB course before my placement in India, this training took my level of understanding of development to a whole new level. I trained with 8 [View Full Entry]

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Some of you are more familiar with the work I’m going to be doing here as compared to others, so I will try and catch everyone up to speed. For those of you who already know what I’m doing or aren’t that interested in my actual work, you can skip to the next journal entry describing my arrival in Zambia and my impressions from my first week here. I am working as an Engineers Without Borders volunteer partnered with a locally established non-governmental organisation (NGO) named International Development Enterprises (IDE) (there are a lot of acronyms in development, I apol [View Full Entry]

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