Village Logic (Scott's)

Before I insult anybody, I want to say that many of the Zambians are ingenious when it comes to fixing and building things using materials from the bush.  Whether it is wire grills for roasting their bush meat, rat traps made of spare wire and wood, chicken coops, or bicycles, if it is broken or needs to be built, they can find a way to do it, sometimes elegantly and others just functionally.  But getting to that point where they see a need and a pathway to fix or build things can sometimes be slow, depending on the topic, especially less tangible things.  A few cases in point:

I had a program scheduled at the local school to help teach the students some of the football (soccer) drills that were learned at a youth workshop back in April.  I had a meeting with the teachers involved and we discussed using the soccer balls that the school had for the program, which were presently deflated and in a box in a teacher's office.  On the day of the program the balls were still in the box.  This was not unexpected.  Many programs are considered secondary to the status quo and are not taken completely seriously until the time is at hand and they realize that it is truly coming together.  So I loaned them my bicycle pump to inflate the balls, at first without a inflation needle, then with a bit of searching in the community, with one.  The teacher tried but was unsuccessful.  A student, who witnessed the teacher try to inflate them, tried the very same thing, unsuccessfully.  Another student who hadn't witnessed the attempt came along and was told what the previous teacher and student had tried but the new student promptly asked for the pump, needle, and ball and proceeded to try the SAME thing that the other 2 tried, unsuccessfully, of course.  The teacher decided it was the pump.  It was clearly not a problem with the pump because you could feel air coming out of the needle with each stroke of the pump.  But we sat and waited for another pump to be produced.  After about 15 minutes we had another pump and after another 15 minutes the same procedure of trying to pump up the balls unsuccessfully, and among 3 different people, unfolded again.  So, back to using my pump since it could pump over twice as fast as the other one they found, and back to having other passers-by, including a teacher, try unsuccessfully to pump up the ball in the same manner as the previous attempts.  Finally, after no less than 8 different attempts, the original teacher admitted that the program was not going to happen that day and that they would work on getting the balls fixed properly.

Our local clinic presently has a shelter where the family attendees of the patients have a place to cook for their family members who are being treated at the hospital, usually pregnant mothers.  The roof is leaking and there are only 3 walls to the structure at present, making it uncomfortable in the rainy season, and sometimes over maximum capacity of cooks.  At a meeting to discuss how to design a new shelter , I asked the villagers if there would be any windows in the structure.  I was thinking of letting light in, but the villagers went into a discussion about managing the smoke from the fires inside the shelter.  Some key points were that firewood is typically used by the villagers, which is a much smokier fire, and charcoal is not so smoky, but is expensive and sometimes difficult to find in the rainy season. We let the villagers sort it out and the spokesman proceeded to explain that, since charcoal didn't produce a lot of smoke, but was expensive and couldn't be afforded all year, the new shelter would only be used in the dry season so that the smoke would not be a problem, and the existing shelter would be used in the rainy season with fire wood since it is more open and the smoke isn't a problem since it is so open.  "But, don't you want a new shelter because the existing shelter leaks in the rainy season?" I asked.  They thought about that and discussed in Lunda for a little longer, seemingly gridlocked on how to manage the smoke, apparently wanting to avoid installing any windows because they were too expensive.  The existing clinic is a nicely built structure with iron framed glass windows and a roof that sits on top with no gaps between the metal roofing sheets and brick walls.  But there are air vents high in the wall to allow ventilation.  The funny thing is that most Zambians live in huts where there are huge gaps between the top of the wall and grass roofs, and these provide great ventilation and helps keep the huts cool in the heat and warm in the cold.  But when it comes to the typical clinic, school, or government office the status quo seems to be to build a structure with glass windows for ventilation, or at least the air vents.  It was as if building a companion structure to the clinic had to built by the same standards, and simply making some open holes in the bricks for ventilation was unthinkable.  We settled on trying to put a few of those open spaces in the brick high up on the wall near the gable for smoke ventilation so that this structure the community was building, which was a lot of manual labor and some financial investment for them, could be used all year.

At a fish farmer meeting that I organized I realized that we were not going to have time to cover all the topics I had planned.  I asked the attendees to vote on 1 of 2 topics so that we could cover the topic that the majority of the people wanted to learn about in the last hour of the meeting, and schedule another meeting another day to talk about the less popular topic.  I asked if everyone understood and if there were any questions.  People raised their hand and as I was prepared to explain this voting process, I found myself listening to an attendee my a case for why a certain topic should be chosen over the other.  I tried to explain to him that we do not have time for everyone to give their individual opinion, so we would vote by a count of hands.  Another person apparently had a question and when called upon they too proceeded to give their opinion on which topic they preferred.  After four of these soap box presentations I put an end to any more questions and we finally started the vote.  This whole process lasted about 15 minutes so before when we had an hour left to talk about a topic it now was down to 45 minutes.  Village Zambians are just not comfortable with the voting process.  When they have their meetings they want to express themselves in their own words, even if the jist of those words have already been spoken by another. 

In a newspaper employment ad for security guards, the final line of the ad, not in fine print, says "Must be 30 to 40 years old".  An employment ad for a midwife says "Must not be over 40 years of age".  So much for EEO in Zambia.  And I guess I won't be trying to find a job in Zambia when I'm done my assignment!