Into the new frontier

Before I start droning on about the day, I’ll start with my quote colletion so far on the trip.

“Satchel, no running with spears!” – Jenny

“Mom, you’re so hyper.” – Weezie

“Are they speaking Spanish?” – John

“Are there snakes in Africa?” – John

“Don’t look at the world through a laser beam view.” – John

“I’ve never lost an argument in my life.” – (yes, it’s…) John

Last Monday, two days ago, we departed from Johannesburg, South Africa, on the way to Lusaka, Zambia. Funny story: I was checking my baggage at the airport, and I greeted the man at the desk with a “hey”. He looked at me hesitantly and said, “I have a question for you.” I waited. “How… how do you great people in your language?” I was a little puzzled, since it sounded as if his English was quite good. “Is it just a hello?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I told him, “just hi or hello.”

“Oh.” He paused and looked down for a second. Then he looked up again. “And what does sheh-sheh mean?”

I was completely perplexed for a moment before I realized what he was talking about. I laughed.

“I don’t speak Chinese,” I told him. “But I think it means thank you.”

“Oh.”

It’s even funnier because I had handed him my American passport a few moments before. I wasn’t offended, just very amused, and now I have a funny story to tell.

On a side note, we found a guy in the airport who looked exactly like Dan. I managed to capture the imposter on camera.

Upon arriving in Lusaka, Carson and I discovered our bags had gone missing due to some earlier pre-flight chaos. I was so tired that I treated it like a huge joke. (We got them back last night, fortunately.) Then we arrived at the Protea Hotel, slightly tired but happy to have a bed to sleep in.

The next day, yesterday, was one thing after another. In the morning, we went straight to the YAPYA Youth Investment Trust in Zambia office, and there we met leaders and representatives from different microfinance groups for half an hour each. These groups included AMIZ, HARMOS, Junior Achievers Zambia, and Africare—all different microfinance groups with different strategies and targets. They described their groups and we asked them a few questions about their work. For instance, AMIZ was an association of microfinance groups in Zambia, which worked to facilitate discussion and information sharing throughout different groups. HARMOS worked in rural areas to provide microfinance loans to help businesses, though they seemed to focus a lot on collateral and payments. Junior Achievers Zambia took a completely different strategy and worked with students to create businesses, usually services like gardening, and then have other students invest in them, all using real money (kwacha). Then there was Africare, which, rather than giving loans, gave training and grants to promising groups of youth in the form of equipment, like a press to make peanut butter faster. All of these programs focused on achieving sustainable and profitable growth in businesses.

From there, we hopped into the bus and traveled to visit different projects. The first we visited was a farm market, where they sold produce and other goods. Two youth staffed the stall with a laptop computer, with which they used to calculate finances on an Excel spreadsheet. However, they also had two empty buildings they had built in the back which they planned to turn into a take-away food stall and a community center. They told us that they had guests come from foreign countries every few months and teach a few community members skills. For instance, a welder came and taught a few young men to weld, and they created the bars that adorned the windows. Another group had actually created the bricks for the two buildings as well.

The second project we visited was an orphanage. As we entered, the man showing us around pointed out the cassava growing along the side of the road which had been planted by the children there. Cassava is one of the growing alternatives to the staple crop of Zambia, which is maize, or corn. We entered through the gates to see a group of young men and women husking (?) the corn, taking off the kernels and tossing the husks. Their machine was a simple sieve upon which they placed the dried corn cobs. They then pounded it with a stick in order to loosen the kernels. I asked one woman what they used the husks for since there was such a large pile, and she said they were feed for the cows.

Inside the orphanage, the children were sleeping, unfortunately, and we didn’t get to meet them. We did, however, get to meet a woman named Kimberly who was a missionary from the United States and who was one of the “mothers” in charge of the orphanage. She and her husband had moved to Zambia two years ago after hearing about this project from their church. Her children were in the back room, though I didn’t get a chance to see them. As we were leaving, I noticed a nice rug in the front of the house, so I asked her about it. Kimberly talked about how the rug was actually made by some of the local women in the crafting groups, how it was made of woven plastic bags and bits of rag. They also made small handbags as well, which they sold for income. Unfortunately, we had to leave before we could go more in depth, but it was a very interesting conversation.

We rushed back to the YAPYA office to meet Ambassador Lewanika, the Zambian Ambassador to the United States. She and her daughter had traveled with Jenny and Weezie when they came to Zambia in 2004. Afterwards, we went out to dinner at Rhapsody’s.

That day was hectic and long, but it was also a revealing first day in Zambia. Just traveling the streets showed it was a lot different than South Africa. People would walk up to your window and try to sell things, and coming in at nine o’clock, the streets were abandoned. But one thing that surprised me was, while there were still corporate ads, there was a high amount of HIV/AIDS awareness ads that were posted all over the walls that lined the roads. The awareness ads were especially concentrated around the schools. But it was obvious that there the financial situation in Zambia was flourishing less than South Africa’s. On that note, Zambia’s GNI per capita is about 490 USD (less than two dollars a day), compared to South Africa’s 4960 USD. Both are spectacularly low compared to the United States’. Unemployment in both groups is high as well: 25% for South Africa, and 50% for Zambia. It’s these numbers that the microfinance groups are trying to roll back, and we’re here to learn how.