Travel Diary July 2013

Sorry for the late update, been reeeeeaaaaallly busy during the last weeks. Will add pics as soon as possible. Peace!

Monday 01.07.13

Sari and Given promised to arrange a safari today. On top of that Maria had me convinced that we should jump down from the Victoria Falls Bridge. Luckily we had a rope! We jumped a tandem swing from there and have to say that the adrenaline rush was so huge that I don't wonder why people get addicted to extreme sports! I'm afraid that the first time for such a jump might have already be too much for me to ever escape the possibility again if it comes in front of me..

After the jump we rushed back to Waterfront where we ate and headed towards the safari in Mosi-Oa-Tunya. Safari was really nice and we saw a lot of animals, such as buffalos, giraffees, antilopes, a crocodile, huge lizards (whatever they were called, cannot recall..), elephants, monkeys, various birds, warthogs and finally rhinos as well. Woow, keeeewl!

Tuesday 02.07.13

We moved to Fawlty Towers hostel to lay. back. seriously. Lot of sunbathing and chatting with new friends. Found an interesting person - Joy - who was working on Zedupad-concept, a tablet that was loaded with educational materials and links to free online universities. I really believe that their project with the cooperatives will change the possibilities in education in any - especially developin - country. I got her email adress to hook her up with GraphoGame-representative in Lusaka, our roommate Karri. Hopefully they will have fruitful cooperation!

Wednesday 03.07.13

This day was dedicated as well for doing absolutely nothing useful at all. Laying down on the pool was the most energy consuming operation during the day. In the afternoon we visited the interesting David Livingstone Museum, which presented interesting details about Zambian history. We jumped into the evening bus to head back to Lusaka. Trip took from 19.30 to around 3.00 and we were instructed to stay in the Bus until 6.00 am to avoid moving out in the dark. We had patience to wait for half an hour and then looked for a cab home.

Thursday 04.07.13

Friday 05.07.13

Saturday 06.07.13

In the evening neighbors had made some delicious foods and invited us over. We had all the youngsters from the neigborhood representing their beuaty and had nice conversations while eating and drinking wine. After that the strong ones - me included of course - went to paaartyyy from a live music bar in Showgrounds to 101 in Arcades. I was still pondering around 11pm do I have energy to go. We got back home at four swetting like pigs after dancing almost five hours in a row.

Sunday 07.07.13

A bit of hangover didn't stop us from going to Sunday Market to see the local handcrafts. I made a list of pictures, prices and contact details of the products and their sellers. Found some amazing treasures as well as nice decoratives with low prices. Here would be a lot of stuff in retail that could raise interest in western art collectors. I bet the prices in the villages where the pieces are made are no more than half of the retail prices. Helping villagers to access collector markets straight would help them economically very much.

Monday 08.07.13

I was supposed to leave to Pia Manzi today, but didn't. Zambian authorities are incredibly well protocollized - they are completely unwilling to do anything outside their program.. I mean core instructions or answer questions out of the range of top 5. Finally I got the visa extension, but sadly the IRDI worker Steven Putter that was supposed to take me to Pia Manzi had to wait his visas and licenses so that we could not go. I went to buy food supplies for three weeks and headed back to Finnish Compound to work with Moringa studies, sales materials and watch movies with Maria. Going to Pia Manzi was postponed a bit but I had time to spend in the lovely company of Maria and Karri.

Tuesday 09.07.13

Today we finally got to leave to Pia Manzi with Steven & Isac. The journey was long, but views beautiful - as always in the countryside of Zambia. We got to meet the local chief on the way and visited the local village to provide food and fuel supplies for the community. I had a great time with the village kids - first we tried to discuss for a 15 minutes but realized, that we could not understand a word of each other. So we transferred to whistling songs and Oh Boys! That was fun! They learnt new tunes incredibly quickly and tought me a few of their own songs as well! Even though mathematics is a universal language, music is defenitely the global one!

The evening we looked around the facilities of Pia Manzi and settled down.

Wednesday 10.07.13

Pia Manzi turned out to be a beautiful Game Reserve Ranch with unbeliveable views, rich natural environment, lots of exotic animals and good accomodation facilities. Totally 15 people were working in the Moringa plantations, others 8h days in 21 day shifts, me & Steven 12h days until we would get the plan finished. So we didn't waste any time, but Steven started to introduce me the whole design system development plan for the area. We started GPS- and contour-mapping the suitable spots for hydropower generation. Beautiful river of Luangwa is a lot fluctuating stream that causes heavy floods during the rainy season and nearly dries out during the dry season. Our goal was to design a damming and electricity generation grid that could balance the flow of the river saving the stream communities from seasonal extremes, provide whole-year wet areas to secure the drinking spots for wildlife and to create flexible hydro electricity generation methods to electrify the riverside communities hospitals, schools and irrigation systems.

Even though the idea was definately worth it I realized already, that this was a big challenge to tackle with such small group and resources. But we were all 100% committed and that what counted.

Thursday 11.07.13

This day we mainly focused on mapping and simulating the stream fluctuation during the different seasons. We found a lot of suitable locations for the hydropower raft design that Steven had been sketching. Learning all the new tools and getting the location markers accurate took me the whole day, but at least I got a weeks job done in a day, which will definately help us to proceed forward the following days.

Friday 12.07.13

Today we designed the water management of the area in total a bit more, marking suitable spots for treatment pools, aquaculture ponds, piping, water reservoirs, forest stream hydroturbines and irrigation equipment. Again the whole day went quickly mapping, modeling, measuring, calculating and comparing the suitable parts for the system. A lot done in a day, but looong days they are.. This was the first evening I saw a wild lion in the camp during the evening. Its eyes flickered in the night when I pointed a torch towards it. I could not identify for sure the furry fellow before the next morning, when I saw huge paw steps in the sand.

Saturday 13.07.13

A long day again full of Moringa irrigation, cultivation extension planning, power & water consumption calculations, area mapping, budget calculation, ICT-tool detailing, HRM tool developing, pest control designing... pheeeeew. Even though I enjoy proceeding in the project, 50 peoples work should be done by 50 people, not by 15.

It seems to not matter at all which weekday it is. I realized this after sending nearly 10 inquiries around different equipment providers and wondering out loud how they could delay in answering for such big scale order processes. Until I realized it was saturday evening and that maybe I should do something else as well.. So I started to work on the University curriculum design. Yippee! In the evening I spotted three lions 50 meters away from the camp. Gladly they seem to not like flashlights pointing to their eyes in the darkness, which - at least for now - keeps them away from eating us.

Sunday 14.07.13

As Holy Day as the rest - contributed 100% to proceed in the design generation. Since still no funding seemed to work out, we were already late with paying the salaries for the cultivation team and our irrigation system needed desperately extension to cover all the area we could cultivate, we started to design products we could manufacteur in the near future to cover the costs of our project in case all the rest funding ventures would fail. We came up a long list of potential revenue streams from various Moringa products to education services, adventure experiences, media products and new plant material processing innovations. This raised my confidense that with these tools and all the help we had asked for we could not to fail in our efforts in getting this project to its next level.

Monday 15.07.13

This day I contributed pretty much for the Birth Center Development project that certain international organization had hired us to do. I will tell more about the details when it is possible, but the main idea was to do an development assessment for 25 birth centers and give suggestions about the improvements in the area. We already had our rural electricity generation project, know-how and seeds for Moringa cultivation, experience in smart phone sensoring and measurement technology as well as new contacts to early childhood educational projects such as iSchool, Zedupad & Souns, so I felt we had a lot to put to the table before we even started. I tried to figure out what we should know about the Birth Centers and their surrounding communities and environments to get the best impact done during the implementation. I also started a IndieGoGo-campaign to support our fund raising and informing about the possibilities of Moringa's huge potential to a wider audience. Today I saw again flickering eyes in the bush 15 meters away from my lodge door when I was going to sleep. I got freaked out a bit thinking that the lions have now got used to the flashlights and keep coming closer. Gladly in the morning I realized from the paw steps, that it was just a pack of hyenas.

Tuesday 16.07.13

One day more of taking care of the existing Moringa plantations, making presentation video to our IGG-campaign, calculating the budget for the next two years, answering to questions from people about our activities, improving HRM practices, measuring distances for the irrigation system extension plan, looking for new possible funders and cooperators, comparing needed equipment, proceeding in product development, taking pictures of the surrounding area, drawing a fencing around the camp to protect the workers from lions and hyenas.. I just really wish that we would get some funding as soon as possible to start implementing all the huge efforts for detailed planning. It will happen at some point, but I would rather not delay since we would have still a lot of challenges to tackle.

Wednesday 17.07.13