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I consider myself a rather clever young man to say the least. I mean I have done the schooling thing to a respectable extent at least completing high school. I do my bit of reading a couple of books every now and then, watch the news with interest and hold certain opinions on local and world politics. Basically I see myself as a product of the modern/urban day Africa.
That small description is enough to put me in some World Bank/United Nations category as ‘literate’ ‘educated’ and so forth. People not in my position are mostly relegated to the term ‘illiterate’. Granted the term ‘illiterate’ literary means ‘not being able to read or write’, but it cannot be argued that a lot of value judgements have been placed on this ‘literate’ ‘illiterate’ phenomenon. These value judgements are most likely a product of what a given society thinks about education, development and progress at a given time. The problem with value judgments, as most of us would agree, is that they are so often wrong leading to embarrassment in a given situation or worse still going about the business of life totally unguided by intuition or any other social mode of conduct. That’s what I am going to talk about.
All geared up, with all the aspirations of fulfilling what my lectures used to tell me about. I set forth to save/serve the poor, the sick and the impoverished of an area in southern Zambia called the Nanzhila Plains. I had all the gusto and drive to do well, and at the time, I felt that all who have tried and failed, on this and similar missions, failed because…well they weren’t me!
Armed with textbook theories on rural development, I knew these ‘Mumbwa Mumbwa’ people needed my hard earned knowledge and expertise. To me, they where the classic ‘tabular rossa’ dumbos waiting to be inscribed with the wisdom I would impart.
Sanitation and provision of water, was my first attempt. I wondered how these poor villagers could have lived this long without the services my organisation was providing. With my notes on human waste management, stagnant water (cholera malaria etc), I was going to teach these villagers something. Clean water through a low cost borehole, fitted with a hand pump was the solution. My company was in the business of providing water through low cost boreholes.
For those in the know, borehole drilling is wholly dependent on sighting, that is, finding the spot where drilling is to take place and eventually give water. The team and I had all the tools needed to find this site, my favourite was some small contraption to drill in the ground to see the layered soil and rock formation. Another interesting gizmo is used to see the level of elevation of the site. Allot of maps describing the geographic surface of the area accompanied these and many other tools. It was tricky to talk to the villagers about hygiene and the good things we intended to bring to the community while the team assembled the machinery. It is an impressive undertaking, to say the least, bringing forth ideas of DECEPTICONS and TRANSFORMERS. No one can resist such a peep show.
Site found and drilling in progress, I continued with the ‘training’ on how to use water. Two days drilling and we found no water. In the meantime I realised there is only so much you can say about how to use water, so I ended up explaining how the machinery works. Drill bits, horsepower, basically all I could say to avoid embarrassment at our lengthy ‘water finding’ procedure. Alas, four days and we still did not find any water. We changed site, set up the gizmos again and began drilling. At this stage, the initial ‘expert’ airs we had where beginning to fain. We stopped wearing the clean overalls and took off our shirts. Our neat pile of tools grew legs, only to be found later hidden in the mud. But the confidant smiles and winks at the onlookers continued. They remained onlooker’s ofcourse. The thinking was that these villagers knew nothing about this hard and technically complicated job of drilling boreholes and hence should be best kept at a distance. We were still on top of things.
Now this new site was understandably unplanned. We had already used up the fuel needed for one hole and we where now entering into hole number two’s consignment without success. I took that with a pinch of salt, ‘helping the poor is damn hard work’ and what is a couple more days in the bush, a couple more litres of fuel, a couple more repeated ‘How To Use Water’ discussions. No problem.
Things became, yes, a problem, when hole number two was not successful. Situation was getting tricky. Fuel running out, food supplies (from none other than Shop rite) where dwindling. The milk had gone sour, sugar was finished and the camps supply of intoxicating liquids was nearly zero (Ultimate problem!). It was actually this that in a weird way saved our initial borehole experience. You see I went in search of the much-needed beverage, in whatever form and texture, when I stumbled upon an elderly man known to all as Aisha. Translated into English, the name means uncle. Now Aisha not only organised some intoxicants for the evenings, but he told hilarious stories for hours on end, soothing our ears from the ever resounding ringing and rugged thumping of the machinery earlier in the day. He was on site at the beginning of borehole three, and that evening we received the lecture.
Basically he told us we were doing the whole thing at the wrong ‘spot’. In borehole speak, wrong site. He admitted that the spinning rods seemed more efficient that a pick and spade, though noisier, but he bluntly told us we would not find water there! As earlier mentioned, sighting is to borehole drilling what the Benz star is to the T of a Toyota corolla! We listened, as he talked about wells he dug in the past years, trees he knew that ‘collected’ water, areas aligned to streams, and rocks that ‘held’ water. It might have been the potency of the local brew, but I suspect we were tired, dirty and basically felt like failures, that we argued little and listened.
So the next morning he took us to the ‘spot’ he thought our rods and drill bits would find water. From my experience in the bush, miracles rarely happen, but behold we struck water on day two of our third hole. Aisha soon became part of the crew. Fiddling with wrenches, pipes and hooking us up with evening entertainment consisting of stories and occasional booze.
Just like that, the so called villager illiterate had saved us the embarrassment of looking foolish with all our gadgets, let alone the wrath of the boss when we got back and failed to account for the fuel costs. The combination of the drill rig and Aisha's knowledge was never anticipated. But it is obvious that without him we could have got nowhere but make dangerous holes in the ground making the area look like some brown humongous cheddar cheese!
And my sanitation training, well I gave up my original script rather quickly. These people were not dumb. They did drink water from pools that looked mucky with occasional bugs doing water skiing at the surface, but I came to know that when water was stagnant they tended to boil it. Flowing water no matter where it was considered kosher. I did it millions of times myself! And as to human waste, it was obvious that their toilets were built according to a V.I.P (Ventilated Improved Pits) style and where there was none the bush was spacious. Imagine the wonder of doing number two as a bird croons in the tree overtop. Only Boys 2 Men’s second album, track number 3, could compare to the serenity brought about by these combination of acts. Of course, as the population gets denser this scenario will have to be curbed, but for the time being its still all-good.
With time and conversation with the people in the community (as opposed to lecture style monologue), I came to learn more issues that are prominent in the area. Bigger issues that require attention than the pre-programmed needs scholars and textbooks seem to ascribe to the poor villagers. Hunger, HIV/AIDS, orphans… In fact I gave up using the term villager all together. I feared my use would be laden with all sorts of meanings totally false. Their problems are very similar if not identical to those we see in our urban midst. So ‘villager’ is simply a geographic reference, period.
Lesson learnt. Driving back to the capital, all tired and chewing on the ground nuts Aisha’s wife gave the team, I recollected my first day in the village and my mind frame at the time. Yes the term DUMB resounded in my ear like the music my co-worker was playing. Something called Drum n Bass. Noisy scratches and fast beats totally alien to an ear trained in 2 Pac and Black Muntu. See my co-worker is different in one way only. The dude has a lighter skin complexion. He is a white Muzungu Caucasian. British to the bone; accent, baked beans and tea. You can just imagine what reflections we shared about our first development work/bush experience. Well that’s another story.
As we approached the nearly bright city lights of Lusaka, we felt rather proud to have learnt the vital lesson of checking our preconceived ideas about people we think we know nothing about. We all have our hang-ups about things we think we know about, but the trick is to take more time and be cautious to ones surroundings. Adopt ones views with the reality in front of you and hopefully you won’t be as dumb as some of us were!
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