Letters From An Island Son, Far From Home

Letter Nine: Maize Metropolis

Stefan Verbano grew up on Guemes Island, the son of Chris Damarjian and Larry Verbano. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in Jornalism from the University of Oregon and is currently serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia, Africa.

His home base is a small rural village near Mansa, Zambia where he is working with the local population to establish rural aquaculture and agricultural sufficiency. Through his writings you get a sense of the joy and frustration at trying to make a difference. Stefan has agreed to share his letters with his home community.

August 9th, 2012

THE MAIZE METROPOLIS
Every year after the maize harvest is processed and bagged, Zambian farmers from near and far bring their bounties to a predetermined location and, seemingly overnight, build a city of corn.

The municipality of grain closest to Mwanachama this year was built - appropriately - in an old maize field next to a primary school halfway along the washed-out road leading up to the tarmac, which in turn leads to Mansa. Weaving through the endless rows of grain bags, canter trucks stacked high with still more 50 kilogram sacks wheeze dirty plumes of smoke as they drive through the field looking for a place to unload, the thick tread of their tires plowing under dried maize husks and stalks - the biological foundation without which the truck's cargo would not be possible. But no one pays any of that golden-brown residue underfoot any mind. Every other piece of photosynthesized matter in their fields might as well turn to dust, for all these farmers care about are the coveted golden kernels that the leaves and stalks help to produce.

From the road, the meadow appears to have the makings of an outdoor music festival - food merchants along the perimeter, open-air shanties with wisps of smoke trailing up through layers of multicolored plastic, ground turned to mud from too many footfalls. But there is no music here; only the sounds of kernels being poured from one plastic tub into another, like raindrops on a tin roof. For weeks on end, small-scale farmers and their families will wait in this makeshift metropolis until their respective heaps of bags can be weighed, logged and trucked away by the Zambian Food Reserve Agency (FRA), a government appendage without which this entire gathering would just be a grubby country fair where everyone goes home empty-handed. In the absence of any real central planning, farmers offload and stack their harvests into quadrants, which, when repeated across several acres, creates a messy grid pattern of alleys, walkways and sagging walls.

People stay here for so long that they make temporary housing for themselves and their kin. And, for lack of any other building materials, they build their shelters out of their maize sacks. After one hundred or so farmers build these roofless, one-room corn houses, the landscape starts to look like a makeshift military encampment of machine gun nests made with oversized sandbags and no machine guns. In the center of these “rooms,” the farmers make fire pits and cook nshima using mealie meal which they brought along to see them through their stay. And the irony is not lost when one considers the possibility that depending on how many days one particular farmer is forced to wait before it is his turn at the scales, he may be forced to start rationing his foodstuffs in order to finally get that long-awaited check in hand. In a fortress built out of food, none makes a suitable meal. Maize, maize everywhere, but not a bit to eat.

Those wealthy or resourceful enough cover the tops of their structures with tarps, protecting their crop from morning dew and the very unlikely rain shower. Surely during most years, the warm, dry August weather is conducive to building a city out of grain, but for the past two days here in Mansa District the skies have been beset with rolling overcast and the imminent threat of rain. Last night the skies opened with only a light misting, constituting the first dose of precipitation I have seen in this country for four months. But the light rain must have sent the farmers settling down to sleep in their tarp enclosures into a frenzy. After all, the Zambian government has little use for soggy maize.

When I arrived in the field this afternoon, the piles of grain sacks were covered with every available piece of weather proofing, from reed mats to blankets to plastic bags to palm fronds. I sidestepped through the crowd, followed - as usual - by numerous pairs of ebony eyes. It must have been obvious that I was not there to sell maize. Villagers young and old were all busying themselves with some specific task making up the assembly line which ends with the heaps of labeled, sealed bags. Middle-aged women slid flattened fresh, empty bags off of a giant pile and shook them open, holding the edges straight as other women poured maize into them from heaping plastic bowls. At another station, other women scooped out the contents of impure bags into wood and wire mesh boxes and sifted out any unwanted grass or loose chaff. Squinty eyed old men armed with needles and thread stood in a line sewing up the tops of the full maize bags, which were then hauled away by pairs of younger, stronger men and stacked beside all of the other finished bags. When a new canter truck would arrive, some of these shifts would change and those strong enough would form a line beside the truck bed, as two or three men rolled the newly arrived bags off the truck and onto the shoulders of the waiting help. The bodies of those receiving the 50 kilogram loads would buckle as the full weight became theirs alone to carry, their feet shuffling at first for it took a few steps to figure out how to walk straight with their body weight suddenly doubled. 

Those not involved in one of the various stages of production seemed to simply be waiting. Some gazed off into the distance while squawking into cell phones, while others sat on top of termite mounds and watched the entire operation unfold. Even as trucks were still arriving, I saw a woman and her young child lying on the ground at the foot of their maize pile wrapped in blankets and chitenge cloths looking like they were ready to call it an early night. Near the middle of the sprawling sea of black figures and white grain, I came upon a man hunched over on his hands and knees searching for cast-off kernels one at a time. He held a dented plastic coffee cup in one hand, and ran the fingers from his other through mounds of sand combing out the little dirty nuggets as if he were prospecting for gold in a dried-up streamed. When he finally had a handful, he would bend upright, still on his knees, and funnel the kernels into the cup with a satisfied smile. Nothing to waste, I suppose.

At one point I passed the weighing station, around which this entire operation orbits - one industrial-sized scale with a 50-kilogram weight hanging from the fulcrum's far end. In a conversation with Ba Ernest yesterday, he told me that it would take over a month to weigh and process every bag of maize in the compound at a rate of 200 to 300 bags weighed per day on this one lonely scale. I used this depressing prospect as a conversation starter with the farmers I met who were waiting for their turn to weigh in. Many bemoaned the FRA and its failure to mobilize more than one scale to weigh what some guessed to be 5,000 bags already on-site, and another 5,000 expected to arrive in the coming weeks. Perhaps this is why Zambians have such a well-developed capacity for patience; everything in this country involving throngs of people and only a handful of bureaucrats moves at a snail's pace.

Ernest is opting to wait until many of the early arriving farmers have departed to bring in his harvest. Relatively speaking, his farm is close to the depot, but more importantly he cannot afford to spend a handful of weeks living in one of these canvas bag foxholes. He has a family and a garden to look after, so he will take his chances waiting out the stampede and, with a little luck, collect his check next month when the selling frenzy has died down a bit. Besides, with his 20 bags he is a small fish compared to some of the more serious maize farmers with their initials etched in permanent marker on every bag in mounds the size of small buildings.

After seeing all of these sights up close - and feeling too squeamish to photograph those engaged in all of these different activities at such a personal distance - I spied a two-story-high termite mound in the distance with the sun to its back, and figured that would be a good place to clandestinely get the shots I wanted. Upon climbing the mound, I looked over the entire spectacle and knew that for the rest of my days I would never see anything like this again. The scene before me was a testament to the amount of patience and work involved in growing a single, high-yielding cereal crop domesticated on the other side of the world. It is this labor-intensive process I saw unfolding before me which American corn farmers are so far removed from; the overweight, sunburned men who sit in air-conditioned combines and plant tens of thousands of seeds in the spring with a few hour's work; the same men who drive the same machines in autumn to harvest tons upon tons of the golden grains, all without ever touching the soil.

And, in the end, how can these Africans compete? These lean, tired black men and women who grow the crop with a bag of fertilizer in one hand and a garden hoe in the other are contending on the global maize market with well-fed, well-rested white men and women with every advantage that modern technology has to offer. And in the eyes of the post-harvest customers, there is no difference between what these two groups of people produce. When all is said and done, it all goes into making Corn Flakes and high fructose corn syrup and animal feed and breakfast meal. How can one farmer have 10,000 times the production ability as another farmer halfway around the world? How can this even be called competition?

Standing high up on that mound of dirt watching this city of corn being built one 50 kilogram bag at a time, I couldn't help but think that these Zambian farmers were fighting a losing battle; that all of this toil and struggle was leaving them with very little to show. Sure, the government will eventually be reimbursing them for their work, and no doubt this is the time of year when maize farmers are happiest to be maize farmers. But struggling so much only to be paid one lump sum once a year and being forced to decide between having enough food to eat or having enough money to pay for every other annual expense - never both at once - seems to be an exercise in futility. These people need a steadier source of income. They need to feel more secure in hanging on to some of what they grow in order to ensure their families do not feel the pangs of hunger come April when last year's money is all gone and this year's cobs are not quite mature. There needs to be vision. Without it, the people will never prosper.

August 10th, 2012
"After two years, you should stay here," Ba Ernest told me yesterday as he sat on the edge of my porch in the dull light of an overcast afternoon. Many minutes ago, he had once again started expounding on the reasons why laying down roots in this country would be to my lifelong benefit. He made it sound so simple; buy some land, build a house in the city, marry a Zambian woman, write for a national newspaper and live a fulfilling life.

Our hypothesizing followed along the pre-established route of several other past conversations, which have essentially consisted of Ernest trying to convince me of my lavish future as a Zambian citizen, and me doing my best to disarm the notion all the while politely nodding in agreement. In a way, I am flattered that a middle-aged Zambian man whom I have known for barely three months values me enough to suggest that I should settle in his country. Perhaps he thinks I would be some valuable addition to this country's workforce, and that my personality would be at home here amongst such stoic and patient compatriots. But as he spoke these words of encouragement, behind my made-up smile my brain was busy dousing the lofty, even romantic idea with unsettling visions of what living a lifetime in this country would actually entail. Sure, rent is cheap (or nonexistent, for that matter), the land is fertile and relatively virgin, food is nutritious and simple and the warm glow of humanity emanates from the bosom of both thinkers and workers, rich and poor.

But it simply cannot be. As much as I wish my neighbors and countrymen around me the highest degree of comfort and happiness that this life has to offer, I do not think I could join their ranks. I cannot live in a place where the underdevelopment of civil infrastructure has crept into so many aspects of life. If I were to ever fall seriously ill during my tour of Peace Corps service here, without a second thought I would be whisked off to South Africa and to the salvation of "first-world" western medicine. As one medical professional told us during pre-service training, this country suffers from a serious case of "brain drain," where citizens who put in the time, effort and money to become doctors rarely stick around to staff dilapidated hospitals and bring home a fraction of the income of their developed-world peers. Rather, they move to cities like Johannesburg or London to make the most of their chosen profession. And, when all is said and done, who can blame them?

I simply can't imagine what life would be like if I or those I loved had to board an international flight every time we needed comprehensive medical attention. And it's not just healthcare. Sure, the novelty of waiting in line for two hours at an ATM or wandering through a grocery store where half the shelves are empty has yet to wear off; I still see these mini-unpleasantries as humorous African idiosyncrasies which could be good material for a book when I finally get stateside again. But to accept this environment as the end itself, rather than the means to an end, is a frightening prospect. Call me selfish, but I want to settle down in a nice, quiet, clean setting without 3-meter-hight cement walls topped with razor wire around every building or mounds of garbage reorganizing themselves in the breeze or barefoot, dirty children limping up to tables outside restaurants and demanding money from the muzungus occupying the chairs. I want bike lanes and public parks with flower gardens and recycle bins and security guards who carry flashlights instead of AK-47s. I want safe, reliable public transportation and clean water, and I want to be thousands of miles away from countries like The Democratic Republic of the Congo where heavily armed rebels near the eastern border must be hunted down by UN troops.

So, if I had the power to craft my own utopian country on history's potter's wheel, I would take the functionality and efficiency of American society, strip away all of its overbuilt, ostentatious, mechanized rat race infrastructure, and implant upon the people of this new nation the pacifistic, easygoing, calm good-humored disposition of Zambians. In this utopia, state-of-the-art high speed trains charging reasonable fares would arrive on time, but none of their passengers would be in a hurry. Exhausted, dusty travelers would find refuge and hot meals in the homes of strangers living in suburban tract houses with white picket fences and two car garages. Highway systems would be well maintained and have plenty of rest areas and road signs, and those driving along them would routinely pick up hitchhikers just to have someone to talk to on their long journeys. Churches across the street from shopping malls could still have flat screen televisions above the pulpit and refreshment tables offering free donuts, but halfway through the service angelic voices and syncopated drumbeats would drift outside into the soft Sunday afternoon sunshine. Old, wizened men would greet you with hands on their hearts as they pass you on the street, even if they still had all of their teeth. No one would be too poor to have a roof over their head, even if that roof was made of grass.

Sunday, August 12th, 2012
In eight days, I will be back in civilization. Since being dropped off all bright eyed and bushy tailed in this place and seeing the Landcruiser's white bumper disappear back down the road in a cloud of dust, I have served my three months of "community entry" and will now soon depart for Lusaka for two weeks of hot showers, clean sheets and three-a-day culinary wonders when measured by rice and soya standards. My training intake will regroup again in the big city for what Peace Corps calls "In-Service Training" (IST), which according to some veteran volunteers is little more than a good excuse to upend a bevy of expensive cocktails at swanky Lusaka bars and decompress with people who know the difference between à la mode and à la carte.

Officially, we will be attending workshops and discussion presentations about different subjects relating to food security and rural income generation. So, besides good Scotch and clean ice, I am looking forward to learning about how to start a poultry operation with laying hens and the finer details involved in writing grants. A few days ago, the director of the LIFE program asked the members of my intake via text message whether we wanted to give informal presentations about topics of our choosing, and I offered to talk about cash crop vegetable production. In my conversations with gardeners in the area, along with my affinity for browsing price tags in the produce section of Mansa's Shoprite, I have begun to make a mental list of several crops that could be grown on a large scale for a profit margin which would blow Chinese cabbage and "rape" out of the water. When I get a few minutes alone with that one inanimate thing I miss more than anything else in this place - the internet - I will do some background research about soil types and ideal climates for cultivation, and all of this will probably get rolled into a dozen Power Point slides before I hop on the 12-hour cruiser ride south. A hint: I have my heart set on garlic.

It will be great to see the old PC gang again. I miss their smiles and their youthful optimism. Sure, we all may be a bit more weathered and battle weary than when we said our heartfelt goodbyes a quarter of a year ago, but as I recall our group was made up of some very strong and enduring personalities; people with big hearts for whom it would take a lot to beat down into the dark realms of cynicism. I want to sing drunken, off-key country songs at midnight in lawn chairs beside the pool and eat candle-lit dinners on white tablecloths with good company to my left and right. I want to throw popcorn at the screen while half-watching an American action movie with a bad plot and great special effects in a theater with red carpeted hallways. I want to walk barefoot on tile floors. These are the things you miss when your world is reduced to little more than mud and grass and dust and cement and drinking water that tastes like bleach.

Monday, August 13th, 2012
Imagine: Sitting in a small, air-conditioned office in Zambia carrying on a conversation with a Kenyan man who speaks impeccable English and just a few minutes ago greeted you in Swahili, whom you in-turn greeted in Bemba. Then, the midnight-black man's Finnish boss walks in and joins in the discussion with a thick Scandinavian accent making his sentences come out like: "vee need to exhameene zee gloops ahlredy in place heyre befohre vee can staht to add any neuh vonnes."

Suddenly, the door at your back opens again and another Finnish man pokes his head in and asks to be forgiven for the interruption.

"I vill only tayk oop a minot of youhr time," he says to you apologetically and turns his attention to his boss.

The two Norsemen then start firing off what could only be rapid Finnish as you, your fellow muzungu volunteer and the equally oblivious Kenyan man sit in silence and wait for the conversation to switch back into a language you can all collectively understand. Hearing four different languages spoken in as many minutes leaves your head slightly spinning, and you must look out the office window and watch the black men in blue jumpsuits milling around to remind yourself where exactly in this hodgepodge of a world you are at the moment.

Such was the scene today as another agriculture volunteer and I stopped in to inquire about applying for grants from a Mansa-based bilateral development agency working on agriculture, livestock rearing and aquaculture projects in rural parts of Luapula Province. Programme for Luapula Agricultural and Rural Development (PLARD), an acronym with an undeniable Scandinavian ring to it already, is a joint effort between the governments of Zambia and Finland, which places a particular emphasis on supporting local farming systems that integrate livestock, field crops and fish ponds. And, to the northern European country's credit, I can think of no one better to come teach landlocked African farmers about aquaculture than a people who for a hundred generations have ranked among some of the best fishermen in the world.

But the truly astonishing part of this meeting was the organization's proactivity. After introducing ourselves and giving the Kenyan man - who is in charge of the fish farming side of the program - a rough idea as to where our respective villages are and what kinds of aquaculture activities we have gotten involved with, he did not hesitate in mentioning that tomorrow he would be traveling through the area to drop off some fingerlings with a group of village women in the process of stocking their ponds, and that he would like to pay us a visit. To date in this country, this is by far the most motivated any Zambian government appendage has been to assist us in the work we are doing in the villages. I must admit that after the tenth time being brushed off with "come back in a few weeks and we will talk," I started to doubt the degree to which I would be able to mobilize support for the projects I want to start by way of local governmental resources. But today I felt that familiar tinge of American efficiency and, as much as I bemoan my homeland's mechanized nature, it felt very reassuring. I did not have to beat my head against a wall on this one, and I honestly felt that something concrete and pragmatic could come out of this; that for once it wasn't just all talk.

As I said before, I do not know the first thing about fish farming. The idea of a fish in my child-of-the-Puget Sound brain is something you catch with a pole in one hand and a can of beer in the other, both feet propped up on the gunwales and a blunt object at the ready. "Growing" fish sounds a little bit like something out of science fiction, especially in a landlocked country like Zambia. But my curiosity in the matter knows no bounds, and this program is working all over this province helping farmers to increase their food security and income with a reliable, relatively low-maintenance source of protein. So I will do what I can to bring some of their guidance and wisdom to Mwanachama, and hopefully I can join the ranks of other dry-land farmers here in the village who haven't the slightest idea about "growing" fish but nonetheless are motivated to learn.

Thursday, August 16th, 2012
And so it appears journalism's craft has not eluded me completely in this place.
I have agreed to shoot, edit and produce several short documentaries about a blind, middle-aged man named Simon who lives in the village of Kampangwe 20 kilometers north of Mwanachama. Normally, I would be a bit weary of agreeing to interview a typical Zambian villager because lord knows I would not be able to edit footage of someone speaking in Bemba without expending a great deal of time and effort futzing with subtitles, and odds are slim that a viewer not versed in "Zamglish" would be able to understand the commentary in that language, either. But luck would have it that Simon speaks simple yet clear English, and through past conversations with him I became convinced that he could be understood by even the most devout monolingual Americans who "don't get out much."

I heard the first rumblings of this project about one month ago, when Simon had mentioned to another volunteer living in his village that he was interested in being the subject of a film project which, telling the story of his pursuit to live a normal life without the ability to see, would send a message to other disabled and handicapped people of any nationality that they were not alone in their struggles. His plan is to post the videos one by one on the internet, using the connections he has with several different Mansa-based NGOs and government offices to help them circulate. The films will revolve around different aspects of his life, beginning logically with the story of where he grew up and how he lost the use of his eyes, and eventually ended up living at his parent's homestead in Luapula Province.

At the start of yesterday's shoot, Simon sat alone on the small cement porch, half of his face shaded by the uneven shadows cast downward from the bottom of his house's thatch roof. He lives humbly in a two-room house no larger than a posh walk-in closet. Since he cannot see through his glassy, half-closed eyes, I talked him through every step as I set up my gear. I told him to take my hand-held video camera and he ran his fingers over the buttons and screen, turning it over in his palm and fingering the lines of hard plastic like he was reading brail. He could hear the metallic slinking of the tripod's legs as they deployed outward, and I warned him what was coming as I uncoiled the lavaliere microphone. He sat perfectly still as I clipped the mic onto the collar of his button-up shirt and slipped the battery unit into his breast pocket.

Then I explained to him how I was going to frame the shot. The camera sits on the tripod to his right, and I sit beside it, so while he speaks, he must try to look in the direction of my voice. This will create the effect of him looking across the frame. How much of this technical blabber he really understood is questionable, but I said it more for my own reassurance, since I had not gone through the motions of a "talking head" interview for over a year now. I finally got the camera level and the tripod to sit still, and we snapped a test run. Then, I played back the ten seconds of footage and focused on the volume level; it could have been higher.

"Simon, you might have to speak to me a little louder than how you normally talk, so that the microphone can pick up your voice clearly," I told him. Then I wished I hadn't. How could I expect him to understand microphone sensitivity and audio levels? He had probably never had to talk into a camera before, and after a lifetime of speaking face to face with people in a conversational tone, how strange must it seem to bark at me sitting half a meter away from him. We start rolling again, and he did not pipe up. Oh well, I thought, I guess I will let technology save me on this one.

Half an hour later, I knew his life's entire tragic story. And the pain in my chest suggested the events in his life were somehow extraordinarily sad, but I knew this wasn't so. All around me in this place there is the subliminal hinting of past calamity and tribulation - the one-legged man hobbling up the side of the road through patches of sand leaning on one crutch, the dirty, shoeless children who seem to live on the litter-strewn lawn in front of Mansa's grocery stores - but when you sit down with one of these victims of cruel circumstance and you hear their story in all of its melancholy detail, your heart truly aches for them.

Simon grew up in the city of Kitwe in Zambia's Copperbelt Province. When he was roughly twelve-years-old he moved to Kampangwe with his father and mother and lived in the larger house in the vicinity of which his separate, smaller house now stands. When he failed to pass grade 9, he went back to Copperbelt looking for work of various types, eventually landing gigs with a transportation company and as a house caretaker. At this point he got married, and set up a business importing clothes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and trading them with Copperbelt farmers for cassava and caterpillars. At 27, his eyes began to bother him, and within a few months of failed hospital treatments and holistic remedies, he was blind. I was not able to discern what exactly had happened to him in a clinical sense, for the only explanation he could give for those first few months of suffering was simply, "My eyes started paining."

Eventually he lost his sight completely, and subsequently decided to move back to his family's Luapula homestead to be cared for by his parents and village friends. At first his wife was supportive of the decision to move, and the couple journeyed out of Kitwe with their two young daughters in tow. After nearly a year of living with him in Kampangwe, Simon's wife abandoned him and took their two daughters back to Copperbelt to live with her father. It has been seven years since he has seen his little girls.

Now he lives in his humble house alone, and enlists the help of many caring villagers to help him cook, draw water and get around. His main mode of transportation is either walking or, when he decides to trek the 25 kilometers to Mansa, riding on bicycle racks driven by local kids. Sometimes during planting and harvest seasons, many of his neighbors are out in the fields working, and he has no one to fetch him drinking water. He busies himself and earns a very modest income raising village chickens, growing vegetables and tending fish ponds with the help of his brothers and other family members. In his garden, he has learned to feel his way to the ripe tomatoes, inching his fingers up the vine and squeezing each individual growth to test its ripeness. On our way back from the garden, Simon accidentally dropped one of the smaller juicy red orbs out of his handful and, without a word, his brother pulled up behind him and fetched the fallen fruit. After so many years, his family members have figured out a system to help their blind brother and son function, whispering to him the number of steps before he reaches a stream, or the amount of nshima left in the communal dinner bowl.

Much love -- Stef

 


"The opinions and impressions expressed herein in no way represent the official stances or policies of the United States Government, the United States Peace Corps, Peace Corps Zambia or any appendage of the Zambian Government. These writings are intended for a small, select audience comprised of the author's friends, family members and associated parties back home, and are written in the capacity of a private U.S. citizen abroad and not officially as a Peace Corps Volunteer or U.S. Government employee."

Tags: stefan