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“We were woken each morning to the sound of 312 children” |
Way back sometime last May, somewhere in Cambodia I was surfing the Lonely Planet Thorntree message board a came across mention of a place called Tikondane that accepted volunteers. I emailed them and asked if they wanted two Irish people to help out. I said that I normally worked in fundraising and Cathal was good at computers. Elke replied back and said come! We said we'd be there around the 10 Jan, 2007 which was very ambitious given we hadn't booked any tickets to Africa and we'd no idea where we'd be next month, let alone next year. Still it's nice to have a goal.
In the event we arrived on the 9th January, so that in itself it pretty impressive forecasting! We had to take a bus at 5.30am, and hustle with various "helpful" types who offered to load our bags for us. I posted Cathal outside to keep an eye on the bags whilst I secured some seats. We were off about 45 minutes later at which point one of the passengers stood up and started to pray in a very evangelical way. We looked round and all the passengers were solemnly praying. We hoped it wasn't an omen.
Anyway we passed out of Lusaka and pretty soon were going through
some lovely green landscape with rolling hills. The journey wasn't too
bad, when we passed Sinda we asked our fellow passengers to pass the
message up to the driver that we wanted to be let off at Tikondane.
This prompted a big discussion and finally one guy decided he knew
where we meant and clarified that it was after St Francis Hospital and
said ok.
We stopped about half an hour later at Tikondane Community Centre. We
were welcomed by Elke who was all smiles and hugs and showed us round.
We had some lunch nshima and pumpkin leaves and met Isaac, the deputy
director and then went for a walk with Liz to a nearby community school.
Tikondane is a Community Centre in Zambia, set up by Elke who's a
cross cultural psychologist and nurse. She arrived in Katete to work in
St Francis Hospital 15 years ago and simply stayed. She's set up this
community centre which is truly amazing. They have 83 staff, who get
food and pocket money, an education, bikes and shelter help. Together
they feed, clothe and educate 556 people, 225 of whom are AIDS orphans.
The centre provided skills training, health education and animal
husbandry and irrigation knowledge to surrounding villages. It's an
amazing project and the fundraising expert in me couldn't wait to get
stuck in.
Our first stop was the community school at Chagwira village. We
walked with Dickens and chatted to him along the way. He's a teacher at
the community school in Tikondane. He's an orphan from western province
who came to Katete with his Uncle.
We walked for about a hour and a half and arrived at Chagwira
village just as it started chucking it down with rain. We ensconced
ourselves in the church (which is unfinished, there's a big gap in the
corrugated iron roof, as they're waiting to have enough money to buy
the top ridge). We started talking to the PTA of the school. A
community school in Zambia is different to the government schools
because the teachers are not trained and the pupils don't pay fees or
need uniforms. The teachers are paid by the parents, more often than
not in maize, which is the staple food. I was amazed sitting on a plank
of wood balanced on a pile of bricks at the dedication of these people
who'd got together to give their kids an education. They had one
chalkboard and were asking Tikondane for some chalk and another board and for advice.
There were 92 children sitting on the floor here in the mornings.
We walked back through the rain, having to cross what was a small
stream on our outbound journey but which now had materialised into a
large river coming up to my thighs. Isaac was worried about us and had
sent a taxi to pick us up along the way and we gratefully clambered in.
Over the next few days we started to learn more about Tikondane. , most of them
barefoot, walking to the Tikondane Community school, collecting chairs
and chalkboards for the teacher. Then sitting in their classrooms until
the teacher arrived. There's about 50 kids to a class. Most of the
classrooms are open thatched shelters. The children sit on mats or on
the floor. Many of them haven't had anything to eat and most of them
have walked for about 40 minutes to get there. But they are at school
and without Tikondane they wouldn't ever get the chance to go to
school.
I started to look into the way Tiko fundraises and delve deeply into
the way the organisation worked and how it presents itself. Elke was
due to go on her annual fundraising trip to present Tikondane to a
number of groups in the hope of getting some money. I started work on a
presentation and some other materials, I created fundraising proposals,
an organisation chart - present and proposed, some figure breakdowns
and created a new logo and brand guidelines. This stuff comes pretty
easily to me. What came as a surprise is realising just what was being
achieved at this little place that's the product of one woman's hard
work.
Tikondane earns a third of its income itself. They have a guesthouse
and restaurant. They have a garden, carpernters, weavers, soapmakers, a
barber shop, they breed rabbits, pigeons and goats. They make their own
buckets and water drums. They weave their own tablemats and floor mats.
They had statistics that most major charities would kill for. They
are providing village education for $1 per person per annum. For their
workers - someone like Doris, who supports 12 children, gets her
children fed, clothed and educated. She who couldn't read or write 5
years ago, can, and she can speak English too. She's got a brick house,
not a mud hut and a bike. Her eldest daughter is doing so well at
school, her exam results mean she gets to go to a school which selects
its students based on academic ability. And this costs $669 a year.
Cathal for his part, became the local computer guru. He installed
and fixed Tiko's donated computers and set up computer classes.
Together we designed and wrote the newsletter, but he figured out how
to send it on the painfully slow dial up connection (that didn't work
when it rained - a huge challenge in the rainy season let me tell
you). We taught classes and helped grade 7 students with their
reading. We distributed gifts sent from Castletown School (where Cathal's mum works) to the kids.
One evening we went by oxcart to a local village. It was amazing to
travel by bumpy oxcart in darkness, looking up at the stars and then
alight the cart to hear the thump of drums and smell a woodfire in the
distance. We followed one of the villagers and we could just make out a
boy carrying a woven mat which he spread for us to sit down on. We
watched the Ghost Dance. Figures flitted in front of the fire wearing
masks and carrying bunches of twigs which they shook at the singing
udulating women. Dust was thrown up by the dancers feet. It was amazing
and we were surrounded by curious children, every so often one of them
would pluck up the courage to touch my hair.
People in Katete live very simply. Life really hasn't changed
for centuries. There's a strong belief in witchcraft. People still
don't understand the connection between sanitation and illness. They
eat maize only. Which is a pity because there's never enough of it and
it needs expensive fertilizer. 74% of people go to the toilet in the
bush and then you can imagine the quality of water they drink. Cholera
and malaria are yearly occurences. The one thing that has changed
though is AIDS. It's decimating the population. A few years ago, I came
across a statistic that the life expectancy for a Zambian man was 32
years of age. Are you shocked? I am.
Tikondane has an AIDS counsellor Zelipa, who provides sound advice
and distributes free condoms. With her I met the first ever living
Positively Group, which is a group of HIV+ people who were willing to
share their status. That's no easy thing when the stigma in rural
Zambia is intense. They often have to leave their homes and family.
There's nobody to take them to hospital, and they must often do
piecework to pay for the loan of a bike. Life is tough for everyone
here but more so if you've got AIDS. However amongst all the people we
met at Tikondane these people were the most inspiring.
There's so much I could say about this little place in Zambia. So much happened and we met such amazing people.
We spent a month at Tiko, and before our time was up, they insisted
on throwing us a farewell party. This involved us dancing (badly),
cutting and sharing cake, and them doing a spoof drama of us and
dancing for us (incredibly well). The boys did some karete
(breaking some boards and everything) and acrobatics. It was brilliant.
Although Elke frequently said just how much she'd learned from us. I
think we learned far more from everyone at Tiko. I learned about hope,
about seeing the bright side about being thankful for what you have.
And comparitively we have so very much materially. But do we have the
equanimity that they have? We'll be back.
previous travel blog entry
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