Blogs from Africa - page 3329

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

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

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

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

After spending almost a month in TZ, I have had the opportunity to make a few interesting observations about local food and exactly how to eat. Starches So the basic starches here are wali (rice), chipsi (soggy french fries) and ugali (stiff porridge). I have tried to steer cleer of the chipsi as they tend to sit out in the open for a quite a long time, only to be re-fried upon ordering. Apparently they make some sort of "spanish omelette" (use term very loosely) out of eggs and chipsi - grease quotient = very high. After some adjustment, I must admit that I am quite fond of the wali. It may be a tad oily (grease quotient = fair to moderate) and may also contain some crunchy bits (mantra = it's a rock, it won't ... read more