Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Ba nzolola

There have been some unfortunate events both in our village and to Peace Corps staff in Kasama, so I am going to get to the bad stuff immediately, so I can expel it, then forget it and move onto happier things.

The worst news: We had just got into Kasama after a 3 1/2 hour ride on a bumpy, empty Sable fuel truck when we happened to meet our PCVL, Ted, in the Shoprite parking lot. It turns out that our Northern Province driver, Ba Lameck, narrowly avoided being beaten to death and is in jail, awaiting a court date. Before I say anything else about the incident, a note on Ba Lameck's character; he is very professional, caring, and supportive. All the volunteers like him, and he's been on Peace Corps staff for years.

Ba Lameck was driving the Peace Corps land cruiser east on Luwingu Road (our road) about 25 kilometers outside Kasama. Ba Jonathon (the provincial coordinator), a volunteer that is our closest neighbor, and the Health project director were with him. A vehicle passing in the other direction went by two children on bicycles. The children thought the road was clear and were riding in the left lane, as the shoulder was too sandy. Ba Lameck beeped and one of the kids jerked his bike to the side, but the other kid, a boy, froze, struck by fear at the approaching cruiser. Ba Lameck hit the brakes, but it was a situation in which only a split-second reflex could have saved the boy. The cruiser killed him instantly, his bike becoming tangled between the vehicle's front tires. Immediately, women from the village started to wail loudly, and a crowd surrounded the cruiser, making big scratches in it. A group of men began to beat Ba Lameck ceaselessly, not stopping even when he was lying still and bloody on the tarmac. Ba Jonathon tried to help, but they began to beat him as well. The health project director pleaded with the men to stop before they killed Ba Lameck. The man who threw the first punch finally took pity and carried Ba Lameck into his house, sparing his life.

The police were called and Ba Lameck was arrested. Peace Corps paid all funeral expenses for the family and a very generous sum of compensation, equivalent to about ten years of farming high yields of cash crops. Driving recklessly, the charge, is only a civil offense, so after a steep fine, Ba Lameck will most likely be released. I'm sure, however, that the accident will haunt him for the rest of his life.

The rest of my bad news is mild compared to this tragedy. I've written before about our lack of a clean water source. Our well is open, not covered, fed by a spring, and at a lower elevation than the rest of the village. Sometime around November, a baby straddled to a woman's back peed while she was drawing water, contaminating the water. It was cleaned, and I held a meeting to elect a well committee and stress the importance of clean water to health.

Since people have returned from imitanda, in the last month, they have disregarded all previous rules. Kids were throwing mango pits, musuku seeds, chewed up cassava into the well or carelessly discarding it nearby, so that it washed into the pit. Most people were not washing their jerry cans before they drew water. These jerry cans most likely came in contact with animal or human feces at some point. Every house has a flock of chickens, sometimes goats and a dog, that inevitably poop in their yard or insaka. Most people also don't have a latrine, and children especially pee wherever. Parasites are prolific, and it's probably safe to assume that jerry cans that are set in the sand are becoming contaminated. Also, jerry cans can also get dusty or gritty. Women were also washing their dishes and clothes in the furrow upstream. There are banks to divert water, but these become erroded from people walking on them, and one heavy rain (and it rains every day) could wash the soap or nshima residue into the well. The last straw though, came when a child pooped about 15 feet upstream of the well. It was on a rock, right on the path. Hello hepatitis, cholera, dysentery, diarrhea, giarrdia, intestinal worms, e. coli...

Chris and I were livid. That is our only source of drinking water. The next closest well is about a mile away. Too far to draw water from twice a day and carry back to our house. A 20-liter jerry can is very heavy, about forty lbs. and we don't have a wheel barrow or a pack mule or anything. And we go through about 20 liters of water a day, much more if we have to wash clothes or bathe.

So we immediately started a door-to-door campaign of the village on the importance of clean water for life. Most families don't treat their water, and diarrhea can kill people with already low immune systems, especially small children. There's also a fair amount of people that are HIV+ or have other chronic illnesses like TB. We tried to get across the point that not following the rules of the well could be killing your neighbor. In two days, three groups visited over 60 households, and spoke to over 150 men, women, and children about clean water. And people began to listen. Chris went to draw water with the 20-liter jerry can and gave two 2.5 liter jerry cans to Muso and Mpollo (both about 5 years old) to carry so they could help. Mpollo told Chris that his dad said little kids aren't allowed to go to the well anymore (without supervision, one of our rules). Chris told him it was OK, because he was there to teach them. When they arrived at the well, Mpollo suggested on his own that Chris do the actual drawing of the water.
(By the way, Mpollo is the boy in the black shirt in the top most photo on the left sidebar, and in a pink Dollywood shirt in the bottom one. Muso is in a jean dress in the top photo)

Our teenage neighbor came to our house to tell us there was poop (amafi in Bemba) in the well we use to clean jerry cans. We went down there and it turned out to just be a rotten guava on closer inspection, but one of the women immediately drained that well and shoveled out the sludge to clean it anyways. People seemed to be following the rules. Then, nature turned against us. Three days ago, our last full day in the village before we came here, our neighbor came to us distraught with an empty jerry can. Torrential rains earlier that day, coupled with the fact that the Sable workers fixing the road had diverted the water to go down a path that led to our well, had turned the path into a rushing stream, breaking the barrier, and ending up in the well. All the chicken turds, garbage, fruit pits, etc. that were within 1 kilometer uphill were washed down straight into our drinking supply.

Chris and I boil cooking water and both boil and filter water we just use for drinking. I think these methods kill pretty much everything, even if there is human waste literally in the water, but we plan to call the Peace Corps medical officer tommorrow just to make sure. Please, don't take your clean water that flows from taps right into your house for granted.

As I mentioned, the Sable road workers have come to our village. The plan is to pave the entire 160 km stretch from Luwingu to Kasama by next year. So far, only about 25 kilometers just outside the two cities are paved. They set up camp about 4 kilometers outside our village, and proceeded to bulldoze 25 feet on each side of the road. Our village used to be sort of pretty, but countless trees were taken down, and it sort of looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland now. Straight out of Cormac McCarthy. There's now a 70 foot long stretch of sand littered with crumpled tree corpses that bisects the village. Apparently closing off one lane at a time to fix the road is not an option; they need one side to park their equipment and the other to build a new diversion for traffic. Or some nonsense. Trees are dispensible; deforestation is irrelevant; a tarmac road will bring development!

Enough with the ranting. There's been some good, too. Our host mother gave birth to a girl, her seventh child. She had some pain in her abdomen after the birth and was taken to the clinic, but they're both fine now. When we asked our host father whether it was a boy or girl, he mumbled "a netball player." They had 5 girls already, so I think he might have been hoping for another son.

Ba Allan's son, little Chris, is getting very fat and likes shouting incomprehensible baby words. His wife and sons went to farm beans near Luwingu for the past couple of months, so it's been a while since we've seen them.

On nights with full moons, people like to sing and dance and drum, so one night after eating nshima, we followed the music to our neighbor's house. The girls really liked that we were dancing with them, and begged us to come with Chris' guitar the next night. They've been teaching us Bemba songs.

My favorite: Ba (insert some name here) batuwina, mulelya kalembula. Oh, cashinka fye, cashinka fye (at this point in the song everyone bends into the middle and claps their hands).

Then there's some others I haven't yet memorized but we have written down. There's one with a pretty tune that starts off Indeke yapita apa, yapita speedi nomwela... The airplane is passing there, it's passing with speed through the air, then the next line is about the plane writing "(football) players" in the sky, and below that "prostitutes." Apparently, it's used to taunt the other team during a game. There's another song they taught us about prostitutes too, it seems to be a common theme?

In exchange, I've been teaching the girls the song Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes. It's really fun to hear them sing in English.

Other than the door-to-door clean water campaign, I've been working with Ba Allan and Ba Catherine on writing a proposal and a budget to get a grant for a training for early education teachers, and to build them an actual pre-school structure. Right now, they teach around 50 kids (all orphans or children affected or infected with HIV)crammed into a deserted tuck shop. The kids sit on broken bricks and write their letters and numbers in the dirt with their fingers.

And now, I present you with some of our favorite quotes:


--- "He is my cousin. He is from Mparapata. He is mad." - our friend, to Chris

--- Nakonde amaguy: "Where is your sister?" (meaning Chris)

Me: "He is coming."

--- "There is one; she is too fat." -Zanzibari hotel desk clerk, describing a woman in a group. We were trying to find our friends.

---Chris: "How many hoes do you have?"

Ba Allan: "Me, I have two. But in fact, every member of the family should have one. They should have their own and not use anyone else's."

Chris: "Like toothbrushes?"

--- A story our host father related to us about a conversation he had with Mpollo:

Mpollo: "Why don't you drive your car?"

BashiAmos: "It's broken."

Mpollo: "Why don't you fix it?"

BashiAmos: "I don't have the money."

Mpollo: "I will give you money. I just planted two gallons of beans in my garden. I will have a lot of money."