First Day at Habitat for Humanity Zambia

27 September 2012

We left at 720am to walk the mile to work (Nigel says it’s a mile, I say it’s more!). Nigel to SC (Save the Children), and me to HFHZ (Habitat for Humanity Zambia), which is right across the street. Nigel usually leaves at 735am to arrive at 800am, but I wanted more time on my first day, not knowing how the walk would be.  It’s been many years since I’ve walked that far in hiking boots with a heavy backpack – I am definitely getting a smaller laptop when I get home, my ancient one weighs a ton!  Luckily the weather was cool this morning with a nice breeze and we made it there by 750am. Walking home was a different matter; mostly uphill, although only slightly, and 90 degrees outside with same heavy backpack.  I was very tired when I got home since I haven’t walked that much or worked such a long day in quite a while.  I work 8am-5pm with lunch from 1pm-2pm.  But after I finished lunch at 120pm, I just went back to work.

For now I am doing online research in order for HFHZ to update their brochures, other printed materials, and their website. Most of the figures they quote regarding HIV/AIDS, sanitation, water, diseases, infant and child mortality rates, urban and slum populations, etc. are from outdated studies.  I spent most of my day on every kind of governmental and non-governmental website you could think of: USAID, UNICEF, CDC, WHO, UNHCR, UN General Assembly reports, census tables, Homeless International, CIA World Factbook, and on and on ad infinitum.  The one website I needed to access the most is the Zambian government website with the country's statistics, but every time I tried to get on it I got a message saying "the

bandwidth limit had been exceeded and the server was temporarily unable to service my request; try again later"  As Nigel says, welcome to Africa!  After I gather all the stats, we will analyze them and decide which ones to cite.

There is a big fundraising event on October 31^st. (I don’t think they celebrate Halloween here because no one mentioned it).  I will most likely get to help with that too. It is a dinner at a very nice hotel for corporate executive types. 

I work with some really nice people.  I am working in the Resource Development and Communications Department, and I really like the manager, Linda Sharon Mafonko. The two men who report to her are the people I work most closely with, Voster Tembo and Sakalimi (nicknamed Saka, pronounced sacka) Yoyo.  They have all been very kind to me.  At a meeting yesterday about the event, I met women whose names are Choolwe, Mofya and Chanda. They don’t work for HFHZ, but are with the co-sponsors of the event.  It is very hard to remember the names, but I have found that writing them down helps.  I have a cheat sheet at the back of my notebook where no one else can see that I am doing that!

Lunch is cooked on site by a paid cook, the same as at Nigel’s office.  Everyone pitches in 125,000 kwacha per month – which equates to about $25, and you get a cooked lunch every day.  From the amount of food I saw piled on some people’s plates, it could be the only meal they eat each day.  Most of the office appears to sit down and eat together at a large table in the kitchen. The food was very interesting.  I knew from Nigel that the staple in their diet is nshima, which is made from a maize flour and water and cooked into a mass.  It is very white and as it dries, gets hard and tacky, so it is much better to deal with when it is warm and pliable.  It is sort of like thick polenta, but has no flavor at all.  It is always served at every meal and is used as a utensil as well as a food.  You take a piece of nshima about the size of a meatball with your right hand from the serving you put on your plate.  Then you sort of roll it around and flatten it a bit with your right fingers.  Next, you use it to scoop up a bite sized portion of the other food on your plate, and pop the nshima with the other food into your mouth, and start all over again for your next bite. 

It doesn’t taste of anything, but it also doesn’t taste very good, if that makes any sense, so I used the same piece of nshima for as many bites as I could get away with, just nibbling a bit off with each bite of food, until it was gone and I had to start again. We had rape, (which is a kind of dark green leafy vegetable related to broccoli and turnips which I think is also known as canola – because rapeseed oil is canola oil) - chopped up very small and served two different ways; just cooked plain, and also cooked in a sauce with tomatoes and ground up, ground nuts.  (They call peanuts ground nuts.) That was actually pretty good.  And then the chicken - I have never had chicken as overcooked as this in my life– it was like shoe leather, but it tasted better than the nshima! Nigel told me they overcook all their meat, and really the only meat you see in the stores in chicken, beef and pork – maybe some fish, usually bream. No lamb, which Nigel misses.   He thinks they overcook everything to make sure to get all the bacteria or whatever out, especially since you often see flies on it at the butcher.  So, with that in mind, I don’t care about eating well done meat!!  

HFHZ – it’s so much easier than typing the whole name out – seems to be really pleased to have a volunteer.  They said I showed up at exactly the right time. My plan is to work there Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and more if needed.