Chikupi!

My JF placement has a portion of staying in a rural village for 7 days and nights, give or take. I chose to stay in Chikupi, which is about 20km from Kafue town (maybe 40km from Lusaka). I wanted to stay with a typical farmer with that IDE group, but I ended up staying with the chairman/lead contact farmer. He's far from the 'Dorothy' that EWB describes, which is a future topic of discussion.

Staying in the village was great! I even tried to keep a daily journal of activity. Around day 4-5, I got some really crappy diarrhea and even puked up breakfast by late afternoon (I had really enjoyed those sweet potatos, too). I think my GI system was just kinda stuck and waiting for me to flush out the latter parts. The family has an open shallow well - it's uncovered, and maybe 3-4m deep. They drink it untreated (they say they treat it in the rainy season). I definitely drank some of it untreated, or barely - tea, chibwantu, sometimes a glass of water after a meal. I try and treat my nalgene and only drink that.

There's also flies everywhere. Gross. Those probably made me sick, since they were impossible to keep off your breakfast and lunch (supper was after dark).

I spent a lot of time being a really terrible farmer. Mr. Mulilo (Mr. Fire!), the head of the household, gets up at 0600 to start working in the garden. Irrigating, digging, weeding, whatever. He calls me up around 0630, and I jump out of bed to join him. The cows needed to be milked (I'm awful at that, I never actually managed to obtain a useful amount of milk/in the bucket. But milk still warm from the cow is tasty!), then herded to graze. The petrol pump had to be primed and started after laying out the 2" PVC pipe where you wanted. The well is not deep because he hit some hard rocks while digging, so you can only run the pump for 15 minutes.

We stop for breakfast around 0900, and lunch around 1300-1400. In the afternoon we usually chill a bit, because it's hot, and people sometimes visit. Then more work until dark (1700-1800), supper in the sitting room inside, and bedtime after some tonga lessons!

In the garden is rape (organic and chemical fertilized), amaranthus, chinese cabbage (all vaguely similar to lettuce), eggplant, green pepper, orange trees (mandarin, washington navel, and something else), and lemon trees. He's got a drip irrigation system for the eggplant, which means you just fill a resevoir tank and open a valve. I spent a lot of time running around the 10x20m eggplants, adjusting the rows of microtubes.
Then there's the cattle - maybe 10, and a couple oxen for an oxcart (the bed from a small pickup truck). He fetches firewood with the oxcart, and rents out transportation services. There are about 30 goats, maybe 10 chickens, and a few dogs. In the rainy season, he has been growing maize, groundnuts (by his wife; it's a woman's crop), tomato, and cabbage.
Have you counted all the different income generating activities for the family?! Diversification is one of the tenets of rural livelihoods, but I never internalized the problems associated with it. 'Record keeping' is often touted as a reason for problems with [rural] smallholder success, but shit, for 10-20 activities it's intense! In canada, we usually have 1 or 2 income generating activities, and the paperwork can be done by someone else! All the sources also pay for different things - the cow milk was sold to pay for the farm labourer. What happens when there's a shock? What if someone in the family or next-of-kin dies? What if there's a flood? What if the engine has a breakdown?

This post is incomplete but I want to just push some thoughts out there. Mr Fire isn't in poverty, but he's not very happy about his situation and always working hard to improve. I've got a lot more to say about my experiences in the village.