Letting Go

A trip to Kabompo

For whatever reason, it was decided that I should go to Kabompo with our buyer Chiko.  The part that makes sense is we want to buy more honey, so we're hoping to find it there.  The part that doesn't make perfect sense, is why am I going...

Either way, I found myself catching a lift in a nice NGO sponsored SUV, sipping on Coca-cola and chewing on some biscuits while watching 250 km of landscape unfold bofore me.

Chiko was suppose to follow me on the motorbike, but he was held up so I had the day to myself.  What a weird feeling, I didn't have my laptop, I actually didn't even have my bag since it was dropped off at his sisters place and I couldn't get a hold of her.  So it was just me and my phone and a little bit of cash...oh ya, and an amazing little town in the middle of nowhere africa.  

 

The Kabompo River

This River is apparently the second deepest in Africa, when engineers came to put a bridge, they weren't able to put any columns, so it had to suspend all the way from one bank to the other.

Chiko arrived on Monday and I got to meet his friend, 'sister' Jean.  She is the sweetest person and was sure to take care of us much the way my mother would appreciate it, reminding both of us to brush our teeth, don't drive too fast, make sure you have enough water....and on and on.

The best part about small town Africa is that you get to walk around at night and not worry about it.  For most of my time so far, I've been stuck in Lusaka where its not advisable to walk around after 8pm.  On our walk that night we were treated to a very stary night that was highlighted with a crescent moon sitting exactly between jupiter and venus.

The Motorbike

My skills on the motorbike are just so-so.  I can go about 80 km/hr on a perfectly paved road.  On the side road, maybe 50 km/hr, and on sand - lets just say its something I'm working on.  

Tuesday we set off and I quickly discovered the sensation of flying on a motorbike.  The logic is perfect, when I explained to Chiko that I dont like going over 50 - he says "you dont feel the bumps if you go fast" - and he was totally right.  Next test, sand.  Deep sand on a narrow pathway.  He let me try for about 10 minutes, but I was way too slow.  We switched, and before I knew it, we were going 80 km/hr on this tiny little path and we were litterally floating on sand.  The back tire would swing left and right and Chiko negotiated the path the way he's been doing for 6 years.  

The feeling was totally liberating.  It felt like a thrill ride that lasted for 30 km.  My life actually felt completely out of my control, and once I accepted that, it was a nice feeling.  The air became fresher, the sky looked bluer and the trees looked taller.

Needless to say, I found out why everyone says a little prayer and does the sign-of-the-cross before getting on the bike with Chiko.

An Option

The next day, the beekeepers we were going to visit were located on the other side of the river, and we had to drive about 80 km just to cross the river using the bridge.  Then we went about 30 km into the bush.  On the way back, Chiko told me there was a boat that could save us this 80 km stretch.  He said last time they tried it, they fell in before even pushing off...so he vowed to never do it again.  However, we were told by one other guy that he took his motorbike over successfully, so there we were trying.

Here goes.

Now this river looks innocent enough, and these guys take people across all the time, but let me tell you...there are hippoes and crocodiles in this river, and if the bike drops in there is about a 0% chance we'd ever get it back.  Whatever the logic is here, we decided to go for it.  

And 2 minutes later, for just $1, there we were on the other side, dry, safe, and still with 80km worth of fuel in the tank.

Back Home

I'm now back in Mwinilunga, after riding through a lightening storm at crazy speeds on the back of Chiko's motorbike for 3 hours, the blood in my veins is still jostling around as if I were still on the bike.  It reminds me of the way I felt after water skiing in BC.  Not sure if mom would approve of all this, but thats the way things work around here.  We would travel a distance of150 km or more, just to speak to a beekeeper for 20 minutes.  Imagine if we could just call them instead!

Time to get back to office work again.  The cash is heading out into the field, and the honey is coming in.

Chiko gives a thumbs up before setting off into the bush.

Moving Around

So I have been very movious as of late.

(still not sure if its a real word, but people here use it often - and I guess that makes it real.  A movious person is a person who moves around a lot)

All the EWB volunteers in Southern Africa met in Dedza, Malawi.

There are 8 new volunteers since I arrived, so all of a sudden I'm not the new guy on the block.  Not sure how I feel about it since it still feels like I am just settling in and as I look ahead to how much I want to get done in the next 5 months, I realize I have to start working more efficiently.

Nothing too dramatic to report at the moment, I hope to have a post in 1 week about my new living situation.

My trip to Malawi

When you get on a bus here, the bus driver will tell you "we leave at 06 hours", but what he really means is the earlies we'll leave is 06 hours.  In fact, what happens is the bus doesn't leave until its full.  Needless to say, after spending the night watching the american elections with some other volunteers we got to spend 3 hours waiting to actually start our 15 hour journey to Malawi.  Luckily, fellow EWB'r - Ashley Raeside, had her handy mp3 player which also has a radio.  So I sat and listened to history in the making, as John McCain gave his concession speach and new president elect, Mr. Barrack Obama gave his speach, I sat on this bus and felt my skin tingle .... as if maybe there is hope, maybe we can make things better, and maybe the government of the United States will take actions that will actualy lead to peace in the world.  

(Not two weeks later I found out Zambia is heading for a serious recession as it closes down its copper mines because of the global recession and falling copper prices)

My view from the bus as I listened to history in the making.

In Eastern Zambia, cotton is the major cash crop.   

I could speak for hours on the complexity of how a business can be good or bad for the small-holder farmers of Zambia, but instead, I'll just say that a company like Dunavant has a lot of potential to do good, yet, because of the lack of competition and transparency, I have to say that Zambia would probably be a lot better off without this particular company.

A very nice town in Eastern Zambia, Chipata

Yes, Obama is popular here.

On my way back to Mwinilunga, I am spending a few days working in Lusaka, which is nice.  Imagine a place where you can just go buy cheese and icecream!  Better fill up on the good stuff since I know it'll be a long time before I see those goodies again.

The guys in front of yet another truck that has been overhauled.

Turns out, transportation is by far our biggest cost at Forest Fruits.  Its becoming painfully obvious as we try to buy honey and the trucks are all down.  Meanwhile the competition is 'stealing' our honey from our beekeepers.  Oh ya, and this isn't just regular competion, this competition is funded by donors from Europe.   Of course the donors dont really know what there money is being used for, and therefore have no idea of the affect this is having on the ground.  The survival of the company is in jeopardy.  Some might say this is no big deal, as long as the farmers are able to keep selling their honey...isn't that whats important?  YES.  But what happens when the donor money stops, lets just say, hypothetically, there is a global recession and all of a sudden this particular donor decides not to fund 'rural empowerment' in Zambia, then the farmers cant sell their honey because they caused Forest Fruits to go out of business.  Now imagine, hypothetically, that the donors didnt bother in the first place, voila, Forest Fruits is still functioning and the farmers can still sell their honey.

Its not quite so cut and dry, but this is really happenning, and peoples livelihoods really are at stake.

Kicking and Screaming

Kicking and Screaming

These are the two words that come to mind when I think about doing business in rural Zambia. Note the caveat, RURAL. I’m talking about a place that is 1000 km from the capital city, and this capital city is another 2500 km from the nearest ocean port. Business in the city on the other hand seems rather easy, there is a huge lack of competition – however this too is slowly changing as deals are struck with China and India.

A few months ago my boss decided this year Forest Fruits was going on a training safari. The team designed a 14 day trip which would cover over 1000km and would allow us to visit all 6000 of our beekeepers. The purpose was to get feedback from the beekeepers on what the company could do better.

3 weeks ago, it was time to suit up and head to the bush. This included purchasing some 600 cups, plates and some giant pots for cooking. Sure enough the vehicle was highly overloaded, it overheated, was leaking a ton of oil and started making new sounds as if to reject the large load we put on top of it.

Never-the-less, we reached our destination and organized the team of 10 who would make up the travelling crew. A big part of the plan we had designed was around food. I have fed 2000 people cheese before, but feeding 6000 people a hot meal in the bush was another story. The plan was to buy vegetables and cows in the villages, we would slaughter the animals and bring a freezer with us to store the meat since it would have to last more than 1 day. Animal #1 & 2 were already cut and put into the freezer before leaving, but what a terrible smell! We set off into the bush in true Zambian fashion – by push starting the truck.

Despite the heavy downpour while trying to set up our tents, things were looking up when we reached our first camp site, ‘the rapids’. It was beautiful, the water was perfect for bathing and even though we didn’t have cell phone reception, this place did have power so we could plug in our freezer.

The first meeting was very exciting, the beekeepers showed up singing and I was anxious to see what they would say about the company.

So these beekeepers are the people everyone hears about when World Vision or Oxfam talks about statistics where people live on less than a dollar a day. Imagine how resourceful you would have to be if all you had was $300 a year to live on? They want loans, they want a higher price for their honey and they want to feel sure that the company will be on time this year to buy their honey.

We spoke to the principal of the school in Salujinga and he said he has just two teachers for the 300 kids. I was at least impressed to see solar panels…although I’m not sure how this helped learning when there are just 2 teachers?

This meeting had 280 beekeepers show up.

Mr. Dan Ball having fun doing a demonstration.

Here I am trying to help in the kitchen.

Here are the real pro's at work.  

I took shelter from the rain with these kids, they would run out and eat the hail.

If you look closely you can see the route we travelled is highlighted in yellow.

After a while a pattern emerged and the days started rolling by.  Some meetings would have 80 people, some would have 280.

More 'Kicking and Screaming'

The roads 

As I moved with the honey team we travelled about 1300 kilometers on roads which connect the far remote corners of Zambia to the rest of the world.  In Canada, these 'roads' would be considered unpassable, long forgotten pathways.  Meanwhile, for the thousands of beekeepers and their communities, it is their sole connection to the outside world.  

We got stuck in one of the sandy planes. (it's a lot like getting stuck in deep snow)

Here we are navigating through the bush.

C’est moi - at another spot we had to get out of the vehicle – this time we had to go off-road..

All in all it was a great couple of weeks.  The weather here is perfect, low of 15 for great sleeping and highs of 30. 

 

A perfect waterfall beside our campsite.

I definitely enjoyed bathing in this lagoon.  Paradise.

This is part of the mission station we stayed at for a day off.

The reason behind it all, the Mbambe (Beekeeper)

 

This old guy (mwanta) is about 80 years old and still has a lot of fight in him.  The beekeepers walk for miles through thick bush to harvest honey, they risk falling from a tree, they get stung countless times, and then they have to carry it back. 

I saw a lot of good things on my tour; smiling faces, waterfalls, forward thinking and teamwork.  And I saw a lot of things that concern me; 12 year-old girls breastfeeding, disappearing forests and terrible roads.

The best we can do is work with them to create a sustainable business.  There may be a lot of kicking and screaming in the process of getting it going, and maybe there is a special set of skills required, but isn’t that the same for any business anywhere?  If it was easy, it would've been done before.

Training Safari

Well, I'm off to the bush for two weeks on a training safari. I'll be camping with 10 other people from the Forest Fruits crew and we hope to meet and discuss issues with all 6000 beekeepers.

Sure is nice to be out of the city again. The air is clean, the birds are singing and there is no power at night. (or in the day most of the time)

Logic

So I realize that I haven't been the most vocal person in the last two months. Maybe no one really noticed anyway because the dog-days of summer are just wiping your conscience free of the concept of time?

Either way, I feel compelled to write something. So what happens if I don't have anything to write. Let’s just have a glass of gin and juice, pick a cool word and let the writing times roll.

Gin and Juice - check.

Cool word...hmmm, how about Earth.

C'est tres cool, everyone loves the Earth.

Here we go. A few of you may have known that I spent 4 years working with my Dad, I took care of Springbank Cheese in Calgary. It was a great time, and all the while I kept my ear to the ground for what was happening around the world - http://www.globalissues.org

In January 2006, I fulfilled my two year resignation plan and headed to Quebec. My heart wasn't in it anymore, and not just the company, but development also. I didn't know if poverty alleviation was what I wanted to focus on.

Off I went to Quebec, completely directionless. All I knew was that my soft side wanted to help people, because that made me happy. My logical side wanted to prevent the extinction of the human race. Sure, maybe I'm a bit drastic, but I think I see some large indications that good ol' mankind was heading in the wrong direction. My first instinct wasn't to become a monk, it was to change peoples minds about consumerism. I read a few books and watched every TEDTalk I could - http://www.ted.com

After all that, consumerism still bothered me...but wait a minute, isn't there something called supply and demand? So if you want to live a consumeristic lifestyle, you'll just have to pay for it. As the Earth's supply goes down, the price will go up. (even for things which should be fundamental human rights, such as chocolate, cheese, HONEY, and beer)

Problem solved.

So what is the real problem?

There is an irreversible component. If you believe that driving your car causes global warming, and that this could trigger an ice-age or at least economic hardships, then hippity hoppity, lets stop driving our cars or at least reduce the greenhouse gases associated with it.

So maybe I believe in global warming to be man made, or maybe its caused by solar flares on the sun...either way, there are millions of people and enough money behind solving that issue. Plus, it's possible that one technical discovery could actually solve all the worlds energy problems AND global warming concerns. And it could happen almost overnight, something like....nano-solar? http://www.nanosolar.com/

What else could the real problem bee? What else is irreversible?

Pollution, species extinction, war?

It was interesting to see that the Nobel Peace Prize was won by a guy who started a Bank which helped extremely poor people get a fair price for the business they ran. Nobel peace prize and Banking, hmm, but where is the link? Peace and Poverty, Poverty and Peace. How are they related?

Turns out, the whole globalization thing is a fairly new phenomenon. Back before the advent of the airplane, the world never had to think as a whole. In fact, there are only two reasons to consider the people in a different part of the world.

1. WAR

2. TRADE

Either you worried about them attacking, or you worried about the cost of those things which can't be produced locally, hence you needed to trade for them.

So there you have it. WAR and TRADE, now if TRADE is related to wealth, and WAR is obviously related to peace...then it becomes clear that Peace and Poverty must be related. (ok, I'll leave it to the Nobel Prize folk for explaining in detail, maybe its not perfectly clear)

Either way, the conclusion is that More TRADE = less WAR.

or

Less Poverty = more Peace.

My decision was to work towards less poverty via more trade. The trade doesn't need to be international per se, but the further away the customer the more peace it promotes. The underlying reason why more trade creates more wealth is because it causes specialization which effectively leads to more efficiency. Instead of owning my own land, planting my own crops, watering, cropping, storing and cooking my own food, I can divide up these jobs and choose to do what I do best. Maybe storing is my specialty. If I work with 50 people, the sum of our output can be triple what we could do individually. This is REAL wealth, there aren't even complicated outside forces to dispute it. With specialization comes technology, the more time you spend doing one repeated task, the more you can benefit from a tool which can help you do that one thing.

Engineers Without Borders - Promoting human development through access to technology.

Indeed a shameless plug for EWB, but maybe there is something to it?

Whatever the Logic, the work I'm doing feels right, so maybe I'm really just following a feeling.

Around The Yard

So around the yard also means around the factory.

Laure-Eloise convinced me that I should put some more pictures up.

The guys stirring the honey before we 'process' it.

Unloading the new machine for bottling the honey.

A (yellow) flower.

Me on a Sunday afternoon.

I have a few ideas rolling around that I hope to share on my next post, coming soon. The weather in Lusaka has changed dramatically in the last 3 weeks, we now get +30 during the day and the low at night hardly requires a blanket. The hot season is upon us.

The Honey Team

his is what its all about...

well ok, maybe it was just nice to have a lot of friends around. This last week I was lucky enough to attend the Zambian Agriculture and Commercial Show, which was amazing. There were a lot of development organizations, but also a lot of businesses.

Rogers checks out a 30 ton trailer

We got tired of walking around so went to have a few beers and watch the marching band from the bar.

This Wednesday & Thursday we had our Year Plan Meeting for Forest Fruits at a lodge 50km out of town. The meeting itself was amazing, I was asked to facilitate (which was a good experience) and it was really good to see what everyones ideas were. I think we all left the meeting with enthusiasm and now we have a vision to work towards for the next 12 months.

Vision, ideas, sharing... those are all great, but for sure the best part was seeing everyone again. I have spent just 5 weeks up in Mwinilunga, but while I was there I made friends with the management team and now I realize just how much I missed them. I took some pictures during the breaks and now I'd like to introduce...

The Honey Team

starting with Evans - he was the one who saved me from the red ants

Chiko - knows all 6000 beekeepers and is a madman on the motorbike

Alice - holds down the fort and keeps us from starving.

Matimba - a real sucker for new gadgets (zen being the latest)
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Womba - still giving it 100% at 8 months pregnant!
Mr. Jalata - he is just too nice
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???? - is this guy ever going to cut that hair. ..
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Chris - my pushup buddy who's trying to shift some belly weight into muscle mass

Dan Ball - busy eating and eating before his wife (Barb) returns from Canada

So ya, no picture of Barb, she should be enjoying her time in Algonquin park right about now.

--Insert picture here--

Barb - the mom/nurse to the bunch who keeps us in good health.

We got to see lions, giraffes, elephants, zibras and gazelles all in one hour!

And then before we knew it our 2 days were up.

A great team, a great place and an exciting year to come.