The beginning of the end

The end of our time here in Zambia is fast approaching. We have just less than six weeks at our placements, one last gasp holiday, and then we’ll be on the plane back to Heathrow.

I’ve been on the downhill slope to Blighty for longer than Helen, as I’ve had two solo trips back to the UK in as many months for job interviews. In the first – for a large international development charity based in the centre of London – someone with ten years more experience than me beat me to it. I was disappointed at the time, but there was also relief; while it would have been in the area (international development) I’m most interested in, there was little in the role I hadn’t done before. Then, a month later, a far more inspiring job for another charity, one I’d never really considered, came out of left field, and before I knew it I’d had a phone interview and they were paying for me to fly back to the UK for a face-to-face one. Hours and hours of preparation came good in the second interview and they offered me the job.

The more I see of the RSPB – the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds – the more I like them. I’ll be their first Procurement Manager, tasked with improving procurement practice and saving them money. The money saved goes ultimately towards their aim of preserving threatened natural environments, a cause I’m happy to support. As for birds, well, with the possible exception of pigeons they seem like a good thing, and if nasty corporates, or poachers, or whoever want to wipe them out then I’m all for protecting them (with or without the Queen’s help). So, indirectly, my job involves protecting our feathered friends; to borrow someone else’s joke, I’ll have to sign up to Twitter so I can tweet about it…

So we go back to the UK with one job between us, which will make life easier financially, as well as focussing attention on possible places we could at some point buy a house. The job is based not too far from where we used to live, near a number of our friends. Longstanding friends are one thing we’ve definitely missed here, so it will be great to have some on our doorstep.

There are lots of other positive things about life in the UK that I for one am looking forward to. Heating, for example; it is seriously cold in Zambia just now, at least overnight, and I’m sitting typing this with scarf, body-warmer and thermals on! To be able to flick a switch and warm up a room or whole house is something greatly to be desired! TV too; there’s been so much happening in the news while we’ve been away and we’ve largely missed it all, except for reports on the World Service and within Guardian Weekly. But most of all, for me anyway, I’m looking forward to a decent day’s work. Helen has been stretched and satisfied with her work for some time now, but I’ve been operating at a say 20% of what I could be doing pretty much since I arrived in Zambia. This has still resulted in some positive things being done, and my employers seem happy, but most of the time I am a long way from being stretched. Six months back in the rat race and I may be wistfully dreaming about the days where I could more or less come and go as I like and still do everything that needed to be done, but right now a demanding job and a collective Protestant Work Ethic is a very attractive prospect!

At the same time, of course, there are plenty of things it will be very hard to leave here. We have some good friends, and I’ll particularly miss the guys from Nomakanjani. There’s a friendliness and ease between Zambians that highlights how abnormal typical English reserve really is. (On my last trip back to the UK I spent some time on the Tube, where no one, except the foreigners, even looks at each other, let alone speak, and people bend over backwards to have minimal physical contact). There’s the extraordinary wildlife and the stark beauty of the African bush a few hours’ drive away. Last Sunday, for example, Helen and I were in a hide in Kafue National Park, overlooking a plain of scrub and trees that probably hadn’t changed for thousands of years, watching as three elephants majestically walked by. And lastly, hard to define, but there’s a freedom, an unpredictability, an openness to life here, or least life as a volunteer, that is largely missing in the 9-to-5, regulated and comfortable life in the UK.
But it is that life, comfortable and regulated though it is, to which we must shortly return. Not quite yet – a couple of months to go – but we’re now at the beginning of the end.

No Shit!

Several months after arriving in Zambia, I read Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux, in which he describes his journey across Southern Africa using various forms of transport, including the TAZARA train between Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia and Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania, a journey Dan and I did in Christmas 2009. Within the pages of this book Theroux is scathing about the various development agencies, represented by convoys of white 4x4s whose occupants never offer lifts to anyone.

On Wednesday 29th June I found myself, for the first and probably only time, riding within one of these convoys. There were three white 4x4s, one UNICEF, one JICA, the Japanese development agency, and one GIZ, the German development agency. We were all the guest of UNICEF’s water and sanitation section who had invited interested parties to visit an area in the southern province of Zambia where they were implementing a Community-Led Total Sanitation programme. I had been invited because of my involvement with the water Forum and myself and my colleagues Tuseko and Miriam were very excited at the prospect of a day out of the office.

‘Community-Led Total Sanitation’, or CLTS as it is known, was established in Asia as a technique for inspiring communities to decide for themselves that they want improved toilet facilities, rather than having them foist upon them, and to choose the type of toilets they want and oversee the building process. UNICEF has been championing this process in Zambia with some success, particularly in the Macha Chiefdom of Southern Province, where the charismatic and well-spoken chief is very proud that his chiefdom is now officially ODF (open defecation free – oh how I’ll miss these ubiquitous acronyms!)

The purpose of our visit was to witness a CLTS ‘triggering’ in the chiefdom adjoining that of the famous Chief Macha – this being the first meeting of the CLTS process in which the CLTS facilitators seek to inspire residents to want to have toilets rather than shitting in the open, to put it bluntly!

The day did not start too auspiciously. We had to leave Lusaka at some god-awful hour as the destination was a good 5+ hours drive away. Then there was some confusion as to the precise location – the car we were following turned round at least four times. But eventually, seven hours after leaving, we arrived at the village which was to be the location for the ‘triggering’; we, at this point, being myself and my two colleagues, JICA and GIZ representatives, at least four CLTS facilitators, plus some government, UNICEF and NGO guests visiting from Zimbabwe, and Chief Macha and his entourage; about 30 people altogether.

But the village was deserted. A few grubby children peeked round the corner of buildings at us, but aside from that there was nobody – presumably the villagers were out tending their crops. We began to think that we would see nothing, but slowly and surely, after an hour of us standing around in the blazing sunshine, a collection of about 30 villagers had assembled. Hurrah – we were finally going to see something.

The ‘triggering’ was in Tonga, the local language, but fortunately Miriam and Tuseko understood sufficiently to translate for me. Anything about bodily functions is a huge taboo here so the facilitators started off by warming the villagers up using humour. Questions like ‘Who had a shit this morning?’ Villagers giggled embarrassedly but a few put up their hands. This went on for a while, then the facilitators moved into the next phase. This involved getting the villagers to draw a rough map in the sand showing the places near the village which they used as toilets. The villagers drew paths in the sand and were given stones to mark the various locations. They seemed a lot less embarrassed at this point, absorbed in their task. But then they were asked to stand at the location on the map that represented where they last went. Embarrassed laughter again, but they did it.

Then came the ‘walk of shame’. The villagers were asked to show the facilitators the actual location where they last went to the toilet, and to bring at least one piece of evidence back. ‘We don’t want a dried out one’, said the facilitators, ‘we need a nice fresh one!’ Embarrassed laughter again, but the villagers duly dispersed, with the facilitators following them. None of the adults seemed able to find one, saying ‘they must be covered up’, but the children were far less bashful and soon cheers were heard as the object of the quest was located, duly brought back by one of the young boys and placed on the ground in front of the seated villagers.

The facilitators weren’t too happy with the quality of the offering – too hard! – so they poked it about a bit to expose its softer inside – flies landing on it was crucial to the next part of the ‘triggering’. This involved the facilitator plucking a hair from the heads of one of the village women and using it as a prop for an explanation to show that flies have hairy legs. He dragged the hair over the shit and then put it in a bottle of drinking water. Would the villagers drink the water? Of course not! Then he washed his hands and offered a villager sitting far away from the shit one of his sandwiches. She washed her hands, took it and ate it happily. Then he went and sat near to the shit with his sandwiches and asked one of the other villages to come and take one – she wouldn’t. Why? Because one of the flies might have landed on the shit and then on the food.

So the message was clear. By shitting in the open you are increasing the likelihood of disease as flies go from your shit to your food and water and cause disease. The next very funny section involved helping the communities calculate how much shit the villagers produced in a year, and they were visibly shocked when they worked it out. They then worked out how much money they spent in medical bills when they needed care for poor-hygiene related illnesses.

Unfortunately we had to leave at that point. The bit we missed involved the facilitators finding out if the village wanted to have latrines, and, if so, help them put together an action plan to get them. I’ll probably never know what they decided.

But I was very impressed with the process. CLTS in Zambia does have some naysayers. Some say that it was devised in countries that are much more densely populated, and the Zambian bush is so extensive and the villages so well spread out that the risks of disease as a result of open defecation are much lower than elsewhere. Others just want to get on with building toilets, eager to attain the sanitation component of Millennium Development Goal 7 – no mean feat! To achieve this Zambia would have to increase the percentage of the population with access to adequate sanitation to 60%; the last reliable data is 2006 was just 43%, and we know it hasn’t increased much. And there have already been plenty of toilets built which the communities don’t use. One of my water and sanitation colleagues recently went to see a toilet that their organisation had installed last year; when they got there no one knew where the key was, and there was a little boy crapping on the ground right outside the toilet.

So community participation is essential. Certainly we couldn’t fail to be impressed by the humour of the CLTS approach and the breaking of such a major taboo. I have got pretty cynical about development during my time here, but I don’t struggle with donor money being used to give people access to basic water and sanitation. And if this means the odd convoy of white 4x4s, well, I can cope with that.

Helen