Martigny, April 23rd
Terri and I arrived in
Livingstone, Zambia on March 8th, more than six weeks ago. It’s funny to think that since I left Leysin
last June, I had not spent three weeks in one place at one time until our
three-week sojourn in Livingstone, and it seems unlikely that I will spend
three weeks in any other place for a long time to come. It felt as though I had given up my nomadism
for a while, but since then we have restarted our peregrinations in South
Africa, so it’s normal service resumed.
After two enjoyable weeks at my
mother’s place in Ottawa and another week in Thunder Bay visiting my father,
getting a flavour of the winter that I have missed by being in the southern
hemisphere (although Ottawa has had a record-breaking El Nino-fuelled warm
winter), I flew to London overnight on March 6th-7th and had ten
hours between flights, so I hopped on the Tube and headed into the city to
visit my friend Sean and his girlfriend Shelby.
We had an outrageously good tapas lunch at a restaurant in Katherine’s
Wharf, a tiny chic yacht harbour tucked away near the Tower of London. It was good to see Sean, whom I last saw in
Bali 18 months ago. We have crossed paths
all over the world, from France to Egypt to London to Japan to Bali, ever since
we met as bicycle tour guides working for Butterfield and Robinson back in
1997. Sean had to hurry back to work,
but I still had a few hours, so I went to the Botticelli Reimagined exhibition
at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The
first part of the exhibit was kind of strange:
20th century uses of Boticelli’s Birth of Venus in all sorts
of post-modernist settings. The second
part showed how the Pre-Raphaelites were influenced in the late 19th
century by Botticelli, and was more interesting. The main part of the exhibit, paintings and
drawings by Botticelli himself, was fantastic, even if The Birth of Venus and
the Allegory of Spring weren’t there as the Uffizi in Florence wouldn’t let
them go. I really liked the painting of
La Bella Simonetta, the young mistress of one of the Medici. Then it was time to snooze my way back to
Heathrow on rhw and the next leg of my
trip, refreshed by a few hours of companionship and culture.
The flight to Johannesburg was
uneventful, and once there, I met up with Terri, who had flown in from New
Zealand a few hours earlier. We had a
reunion, catching up on the past three weeks, and then got on separate flights
back north to Livingstone. I was stamped
into my 123rd country and emerged to find Terri waiting with Mr. Sakala,
the driver/advisor who has worked with Terri on her Zambian trips since
2007. We drove to YCTC, a youth
vocational training centre run by the local Catholic diocese, and settled in
for our long stay.
Terri has been running a
humanitarian trip for students from her former school since 2007, bringing in
Japanese high school students to do work at a small pre-school that she has
been funding for the past 9 years. Even
though she no longer works in Switzerland, the school ran a trip this year and
we were on hand to help run it. In
contrast to previous years, we arrived a good 10 days before the students to
give Terri a chance to do some time-consuming bureaucratic work and keep an eye
on the construction of a new classroom building. I had never visited Zambia, and had been
hearing about this project for years, so when we both left our jobs last June
to travel, we decided that it was a perfect chance for me to see the pre-school
in action.
My first impressions of Zambia
were of heat, rain and a strange déjà vu.
I lived in Tanzania back in 1981-2, when my father worked for 2 years at
a university in Morogoro. Morogoro is on
the train line and road leading to Zambia, and we would see heavily-laden
copper trucks roaring along the road whenever we drove out of town. Looking around Libuyu, the poor neighbourhood
of Livingstone in which YCTC is located, I could have been back in Tanzania 35
years ago. There were a few differences;
cell phones have arrived in a big way, and the cars are all Japanese instead of
the Peugeots, Volkswagens and Land Rovers I remembered, but the shanty towns,
the women walking long distances with heavy loads on their heads, the dirt
roads, the huge numbers of children and the Asian-owned shops were all familiar
sights. Although Zambia is held up as an
example of Rising Africa (the 15-20 sub-Saharan countries that have shown
sustained economic growth since about 2000), in the outskirts it looks more
like Stagnant Africa. Long line-ups at
service stations for scarce gasoline, frequent power cuts and complaints of
official corruption were drearily similar to my childhood memories.
I had never done voluntary
humanitarian work, and I have to confess that my two adolescent years in
Tanzania left me a bit skeptical of the entire aid industry, which too often
seems to degenerate into empire building and boosting home-country industries,
rather than bringing about lasting improvement in the lives of people in the
target country. Terri’s ongoing project in the poor neighbourhood of Ngwenya,
though, was quite different.
It’s run on
a shoestring, using money raised by students at her former school, the Kumon
Leysin Academy in Switzerland (KLAS, or Kumon).
Students, Terri and (this year) her successor Angela raise money by
selling snacks at school, running bake sales and a big charity raffle. This year Angela and some of her enterprising
students took fundraising to a whole new level with enthusiasm, persistence and
the clever use of online fundraising tools, and raised far more than had ever
been raised in a single year before. That
money, of course, goes far further in Zambia than in overpriced Switzerland and
has a huge effect on the lives of over 100 pre-school and lower elementary
pupils at the newly re-named Olive Tree Learning Centre. The money goes to pay for half of the
salaries of the teachers and staff at the school, as well as for the school
lunch program and for occasional capital projects, such as the construction
this year of a new building which will double the available classroom space.
It might well be asked why a
project that has been running for 9 years still needs ongoing funding support;
one of the great complaints about aid and humanitarian projects is that they
never become self-funding. I had the
task of having a look at the financial books this year and essentially the
school funds about half of its ongoing expenses through school fees which, at
130 kwacha (about 12 US dollars) per term, or 36 dollars a year, are very
modest but still beyond the very modest means of many parents in what is a very
low-income area where huge family sizes are the norm. If the school were to charge 300 or 400
kwacha a term (some of the schools for better-off students in Livingstone
charge more like 600 kwacha a term), it would cover its expenses, but would in
the process price out the very students that Terri has always wanted to help
the most.
About a quarter of the
students who attend the Olive Tree do so free of charge, as the school
management feels that their families are too poor to be able to pay any fees at
all. The others pay a low fee that helps
fund the school without making it a school just for the better-off. The additional funding brought in by Kumon
students is the difference between having another school for lower-middle-class
pupils and having a school that makes a huge difference in the lives of the
poorest children in a tough neighbourhood.
The big construction project this
year took up a lot of time and organizational effort. Essentially a three classroom building, with
two classrooms for the expansion of the school up to grade four and one
multipurpose room that could be used for adult education or for income-generating
activities to increase the self-funding capacity of the school, was being built
from the ground up. We watched the
building rise from the extra plot of land that had been purchased a couple of
years earlier. One builder, a few
permanent staff and some casual labourers methodically moulded construction
blocks from sand and cement, laid a big concrete foundation slab and then began
laying courses of blocks. It all
happened remarkably quickly, in a matter of perhaps six weeks in total. What amazed me was the cost. A fairly sturdy construction, tons of sand
and concrete, doors, gates, windows, many man-weeks of labour, and it was all
done for under US$10,000. The same
building would have cost 25 times as much in Switzerland, and 10 times as much
in Canada. Of course, the fact that
building labourers work for 20 or 30 kwacha a day helps keep costs down.
At any rate, we watched the building
foundations being prepared for the big day of concrete laying as we waited for
the Kumon students to arrive. Justin,
the contractor, worked harder than any of his labourers laying blocks, mixing
mortar and shoveling sand. He had
conferences with Mr. Sakala, our driver, who had been a builder in his day and
was a masterful jack of all trades; they discussed the design of the building,
the height of the concrete slab, the supply of bricks and sand. I even got in on the act, trying to estimate
the number of blocks we would need to produce, and hence the quantity of sand
and cement we would need.
The pre-school itself, still
called the Little Angels Pre-School (the Olive Tree re-naming would happen
while the Kumon students were there) was a hive of activity whenever we
visited. The school consisted of a main
building with two classrooms and a tiny office, a cookhouse that had one room
being used as a classroom during the construction (which had claimed one classroom
as a storeroom for construction materials), a couple of latrines for the
students and a chicken coop where the school supplemented its meagre income
from school fees by raising chicks to adult size and then selling them for 45
kwacha (US$ 4) each. It was a mildly
profitable business that kept the otherwise chronically underemployed security
guard busy.
It seems as though every
humanitarian endeavour in Livingstone has a similar income-generating activity
(IGA, in the parlance) going to supplement funds from overseas donors. Chicken raising is a popular one, along with
sewing, vegetable farming and an Italian restaurant (Olga’s) that was founded
to help support YCTC, the Catholic diocese’s training centre for
underprivileged youth. It’s a worthwhile
idea to help projects become self-sustaining, but these IGAs run the risk
either of not making enough money, or of falling into disrepair due to lax
oversight. Olga’s was apparently not
making nearly the money that had been forecast, while YCTC’s IGAs (making
furniture and selling clothing) were languishing because of cutbacks, lack of
motivation and quality-control issues.
The Olive Tree is attended
full-time by two classes of pre-schoolers, and two half-day classes of grades 1
and 2. The enrolment of almost 120 is about
eight times what it was in 2007 when Terri got involved in the project, and the
school is thriving. The three full-time
teachers run their classes with lots of energy and enthusiasm while the school
lunch program for the pre-school classes has the pupils looking well-fed and
healthy. One day, walking around the
Ngwenya neighbourhood around the school, Terri and I saw a number of students
with the orange hair and bulging abdomens that are tell-tale signs of
protein-poor diets and malnutrition. I
was amazed that the school was able to feed 70 kids four lunches a week on a
budget of about US$100 a month. That’s
basically about 10 US cents a meal. The
staple starch of Zambia, maize-flour porridge called nshima (think of polenta)
is unbelievably cheap, and it is supplemented by green vegetables, dried fish
and beans. And yet, despite these low
prices, many of the parents of the neighbourhood, working piecework for the
rock quarries of the area, are unable to provide enough food for their extensive
families. The school lunch is vital for
the pupils, almost more important than the educational opportunities that are
also on offer. It amazes me how little
money it can take to make a real, tangible difference in the lives of so many
children.
When we weren’t visiting the
Olive Tree-to-be, we went to town to do grocery shopping, to buy construction
materials and paint, and to visit some of the circle of friends and
acquaintances that Terri has amassed over the years of coming to Livingstone. The no-nonsense Irish nuns of the Little
Sisters of St. Francis, Sisters Frances and Fidelma, provided interesting
conversation and insight into the problems of trying to run charitable programs
in Zambia. Mr. Sakala gave us stories of
economic mismanagement and official corruption.
Ms. Bwaliya, a dear friend who used to work at YCTC, told stories of her
family and community that were straight out of Dickens or Victor Hugo, full of
poverty, disease, untimely death and horrible crime; I was amazed at her
ability to keep going and keep smiling in the face of such adversity. Zambia has a huge number of orphans whose
parents have died young of AIDS, and yet seems to have almost no street kids
sleeping rough at night; the extended family takes in the orphans, swelling
already large families to Biblical proportions.
The main complaints that Zambians
have about their country and their government are those that you might
expect: shortages of running water,
electricity and gasoline; official corruption; a lack of jobs for graduates;
and misguided economic policies that have hollowed out the small industrial
base that once existed. While economic
growth has occurred over the past 15 years, its benefits do not seem to have
been very widely spread. There is still
widespread and obvious poverty, and now that copper prices have fallen off a
cliff and the copper mines that were once the leading exports are mothballed,
and with a drought driving up prices of corn flour, many people are struggling
more than before to make ends meet. The
story of decisions made in the 1990s to allow imports of cheap used Japanese
cars and cheap second-hand Asian clothing were interesting and a bit
depressing. Livingstone had a Fiat car
assembly factory, a Bata shoe factory and a textile mill that made
blankets.
Shortly after the cheaper
imports were allowed, these three factories were gone, taking hundreds (perhaps
thousands) of relatively well-paid steady industrial jobs with them and casting
the former employees back into the more precarious world of informal employment. It hardly seems the way to develop a modern
prosperous economy, and it’s certainly not the route taken by Japan, South
Korea, China, Malaysia and other Asian countries to raise the living standards
of most of their populations. With a
hotly-contested election coming up later this year, Zambians fear both more
economic populism and real electoral violence.
At the end of the day, Terri and
I often went to a couple of riverside restaurants to take in the breathtaking
sunsets. The Royal Livingstone has an
air of colonial elegance and an unbeatable location, along with giraffes,
zebras and impalas roaming the grounds.
One of the giraffes, a big male named Bob, took a dislike to me and
would advance menacingly if he caught sight of me. By the time we left Livingstone, Bob had been
deported from the hotel back to a nearby national park for being aggressive
with other hotel guests. Terri and I
would sit watching the sunset, sipping drinks and watching the passing birdlife. It was Terri’s favourite spot to end the
day. We also went to the Riverside
restaurant, just up the river, with an equally lovely view but without the
genteel air of the Royal Livingstone.
Olga’s Restaurant, the Italian joint started as an IGA for YCTC (I feel
like a proper NGO worker, spouting an alphabet soup of acronyms) and the
Zambezi Café, a lively joint popular with the local Zambian middle class, were
other frequent supper spots. Then we
would return to YCTC, often in the darkness of a power cut, and sleep under our
sagging mosquito nets.
Then, suddenly, the day of
arrival was at hand and 15 Japanese high school students and Angela, their
South African-born supervising teacher, were at the airport (sadly, without
their luggage). The next 9 days passed
in a blur, with work trips to the preschool, a cultural exchange with YCTC
students, a class trip with one of the pre-school classes to a big cat centre
and an amazing safari trip to Chobe National Park (across the Zambezi in
Botswana, a trip which I will write about in a separate post). The trip, honed over the years by Terri, was
a good mixture of activities for the students.
Essentially Angela and the students had already done a lot of the hard
work over the past 7 months in raising thousands of dollars to fund the
project; that was their biggest practical contribution, and without that money
Olive Tree wouldn’t be able to keep operating.
At the same time, though, Terri wanted the students to learn through
doing and contributing, so we put the students to work making construction
blocks, repairing broken windows and repainting the original school
building. They also taught lessons one
day to the youngsters at Olive Tree, and escorted two or three pre-schoolers
each on the trip to Mukuni Big Five, the cat sanctuary.
I think that it was important for the Kumon
teenagers to see the results of their fundraising, the smiling, irrepressible
youngsters in their neat uniforms lining up for school lunches, eager to show
off their poems and songs. This sort of
direct experiential learning leaves a much more lasting impression on teenagers
than any number of academic lessons on the developing world.
The impression can be so lasting,
in fact, that students come back to Zambia on their own initiative to
volunteer. While we were there we spent
a lot of time with Daiki, a former Kumon student who was on Terri’s first-ever
Zambia trip in 2007. He is now a
graduate student in Switzerland, studying international development, and was on
his second internship at YCTC. He said
that it was only a few years after the trip that he realized what a profound
effect the trip had had on his conception of the world, and he was keen to try
to help the students on this year’s trip get the most out of their
experience. It was great for me to have
Daiki around as he was quite a good source of local information on what was
going on at YCTC and in the wider community.
He also organized three local Japanese overseas volunteers who were
working in the neighbourhood to come have dinner with the Kumon students one
night and give insight into the life of an overseas volunteer.
The cultural exchange program
with the students at YCTC got off to a slow start, with the YCTC group very
late in arriving from their classes, but once it got going, it was a very
worthwhile experience, with the Japanese demonstrating some typical Japanese
skills like origami, calligraphy and wearing a kimono, while a group of YCTC
students showed off their drumming and dancing skills. Afterwards, there were throngs of Zambian
students clustered around the tables getting their names written in Japanese
characters or trying their hand at origami.
I think it was a good chance to bridge the huge gap in affluence,
experience and expectation between the two groups.
When we had finished the
“service” part of the trip, on Friday morning, after six days of whirlwind
activity, when we said goodbye to the pre-schoolers in the parking lot of the
Big Five, it was finally a chance for the students to have a more touristy
experience. We went to Victoria Falls
(my first visit after being in Livingstone for two and a half weeks) and
experienced the awesome volume of water hurtling over the precipice. At places the spray returning to the ground
from the sky was like a second waterfall, drenching anything not protected by a
waterproof rain poncho. We could only
really see one half of the falls, as the Zimbabwean half was completely lost in
the dense clouds of spray.
The
waterfall’s spray is visible from many kilometres away on a clear day and is
perhaps the most impressive part of an impressive natural sight. That evening we had a celebratory dinner at
the Royal Livingstone before heading off to the Chobe safari early the next
morning.
When we came back from astounding
Chobe, we had one final trip out to the Olive Tree, distributing some of the
suitcases of donated clothing and sports equipment that the Kumon students had
brought. We talked through the
figures: the amazing amounts of money
raised, and where that money was going to be spent. We talked about what their efforts meant in
giving youngsters in the poorest part of a poor country a bit of a head start
through providing them with a safe space to learn and enough food to eat to be
able to learn. It was a bit
heartbreaking seeing the crowds of youngsters from that neighbourhood who don’t
go to school running wild in the streets, with little prospect of ever getting
an education or a decent opportunity in life.
The educational needs of the community are far greater than one small school
can provide for, but it’s better to do what we can than to do nothing.
As we waved goodbye to the Kumon
group at Livingstone airport, it was a bit of a relief after 9 very intense
days involving a lot of organizing and oversight, but it was also satisfying to
have been part of providing both a possibly transformative educational
experience to the Japanese students and a much-needed leg up to a worthy cause
that is making a difference in the lives of a hundred families in Ngwenya
township. My long-held skepticism of a
lot of large-scale aid projects is still there, but a small, focused effort
like Olive Tree really does seem to be an incredibly efficient use of resources
to do the maximum good. There is still a
ton of basic needs unmet in the townships around Livingstone (running water, sewage,
electricity, health care, education) and it would be nice if the Zambian
government did a better job of meeting these, but until (and if) that happens,
projects like the Olive Tree will continue to play a vital role in trying to
make a difference. I am immensely proud
of Terri and the program she has built up over the years, and I was glad to
play a small part in this year’s trip.
And then, once it was all over,
it was time for us to handle the last bureaucratic paperwork and have some
fun. On Monday, March 28th we
met up with a former colleague of mine, Nathalie, who is now working at an
international school in Lusaka. It was
great to catch up with her and with the group of colleagues with whom we were
travelling. Then on Tuesday Terri and I
treated ourselves to a microlight flight over the falls. It was eye-wateringly expensive at US$ 165
for a 15-minute joyride, but it was a once-in-a-lifetime sort of thrill, and
provided by far the best overall view of the falls, as well as glimpses of
giraffes, buffalo and hippos in the surrounding national parks.
 
On Wednesday, March 30th
we packed our bags, said goodbye to YCTC and to Mr. Sakala and caught a flight
to Cape Town to start the next phase of our journey: our overland trip around Africa. More on that (and on the trip to Chobe)
later!
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| Late afternoon light on the Zambezi |
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| That smile says it all; it's why people volunteer |
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