Blog Post 6 – First thoughts on Pemba (May 24)

So I've only been here 3 days, so I am probably not completely qualified to comment, but I will anyway. There is a ton to explain, so I will list some Zambian facts here, that you will need to understand in order for the story to make sense. However I this post will still be pretty disorganized and jump around everywhere, and long.

-There is no garbage collection in Pemba (or most of Zambia from what I've seen). This means you throw your garbage wherever you like, in the road, in the ditch, sometimes in big holes in the ground.
-Everyone sweeps their yards. Yards are small (20 or 30 sq ft.) dusty patches of sand.
-Washing and evacuation tasks are undertaken in different venues depending on the location.
-Zambia is cold in the winter. I was surprised, but often at night and the morning, or when it is cloudy, I am wearing a sweater or jacket, and apparently it gets colder, before heating up in August. I am actually considering getting another sweater, but we will see.

For now I am staying with a 27 year old Zambian, Mukelabai, who is a friend of my counterpart. Mukelabai just moved into a new place the day I arrived, so the two of us are sharing a 5 room house. The first thing that had to get done, according to Mukelabai, was to fix up and clean the place. While I expected this meant we would spend some time cleaning the yard and rooms, it actually meant he had paid a local woman to clean the inside, and pick up all the garbage and sweep the yard. Today we also did some more sweeping and cleaning ourselves, and its starting to look pretty good, though there are spiders and cockroaches everywhere (including all over the food!)

I probably won't stay here too long, maybe a week or two. I am hoping to meet some of the local farmers over the next week, while working with IDE. Some nearby villages are only 5km or so from the office, so I can easily walk or ride a bike from one of them to work in the morning and night. It would be good exercise too. I am hoping that if I get on this right away, I can even start a small garden of my own, and get a feel for how to grow vegetables, and how local farmers deal with irrigation, weeds and fertilizers. Something like tomatoes or onions could probably be harvested before I leave in August.

Mukelabai and I have running water, at the tap outside. In Pemba, the water comes from 5 boreholes and is pumped out using electric pumps. Then it is chlorinated, and stored in the water tower. This is fed underground to a series of taps, it appears there is one in each yard. Generally you will fill a bucket (or many buckets) with the water and use this for your water needs. It is interesting to see how much less water you use for things like washing your hands, showering and dishes when you have to carry your own water, even from a nearby tap. Staying in a village could be pretty interesting.

Today we did the laundry, which was fun. The preferred laundry detergent here is BOOM which apparently makes your clothes lighter after some use, so I'm glad I don't have any super nice clothes here. The technique is as follows: you fill a bucket with water, and squeeze out some BOOM paste into your hand. You rub this into the water, to make suds. Then you put some clothes in, and grab a fistful of the clothing in your left, and rub with another part of the clothing your right. For stains, just apply extra BOOM. Then you rinse in a second bucket, and make sure to get all the BOOM out. Hang dry on a clothsline. It probably took me an hour and a half to wash 5 shirts, a pair of khakis, and socks and boxers... so there is room for improvement. But they are drying pretty fast.

Here is a picture of my first morning at the office. Yes, that is men standing around fixing a motorbike. After a while of learning the ins and outs of fixing stuff with very limited tools, which people here are excellent at, I went inside the office and talked with Liana about what she has been up to. Liana is an intern from one of the local collages, and has been at IDE since February. She has been going to 3 local villages, interviewing farmers about their crops to find the most profitable vegetables. Recently (in the last week of so) she has setup some demonstration plots at each village, to showcase correct planting techniques. She will be gone before the crops are done, so part of my job is to go around with her over the next month or so, learn how to do her work, and then take over when she leaves.

For bathroom uses near the office, there is a concrete room and a door, which I opted to close, and then found myself locked in! I had to climb out the window, much to the amusement of my counterpart who explained to me that the door automatically locks, and the door handle is missing, and then opened it using a spoon. Bathroom facilities are a hole in the concrete floor, which is the entrance into a pit about 20 ft deep (my best guess by shining a flashlight down). Aim is important, since the hole is only about 5 inches wide, by 10 inches long. Showering requires a bucket of water and soap, and then you sweep any excess water into the hole with a nearby broom. Some places do have flush toilets, but no running water, so you have to flush with a bucket of water.

Our house has some interesting electrical oddities too. Only 3 light bulbs can be on at once, without tripping the lighting circuit. However the electric stove, Mukelabai's stereo and TV equipment, and 2 laptops can be plugged in without any issues. “The stove has no power switch” explains Mukelabai as he separates the hot wire from the stove from the hot wire from the wall, and a small stream of blue sparks appear. The wires are bent into hook shapes to facilitate this primitive power switch. Hmm, pretty sketch.

I should mention that the stars here are unbelievable! It is insanely dark in Pemba, because there are almost no streetlights, and everything goes quiet past 6 or 7 at night. You can look up and see way more stars than I can see, even in Langley.

I know this was a fairly long post, as there are a lot of neat things about Pemba. Instead of trying to detail each one now, especially with my limited knowledge and experience, I think over the next month or so I will try to document a few things in more depth. A quick sneak preview of upcoming blog posts could include: food in Zambia, nearby towns, the market, clothing, village life, and of course a day in the life at IDE...

...Mike