permaculture advocate in Zimbabwe - too little/too much rain

I am putting my thoughts down on things I want to say during the meeting I will be having with mai Kumbi. It will be two weeks on Monday, and because I have a class during the week, we will have the meeting on Saturday.

1) The fact that I want us to talk means I still want her to stay for us to fix things, otherwise I could have just told her it's non negotiable.

2) The problem is we are not productive, apart from the benefit of the house which is benefiting only her, we cannot talk about huge benefits from our labor. Which is what I  want us to honestly talk about with our guards down and see if we can change things.

3) One problem I am sure about is that we have some kind of broken communication. The last time we spoke we had agreed to meet after a few days. When mai Kumbi felt I needed to cool down and decided not to meet, she did not think to tell me before our meeting time. She just didn't turn up and then decided to tell me afterwards that she had decided not to show up. This is exactly what I was trying to tell her,  we talk about something and I am not a part of the process when the decision changes. This is bothering me a lot and she would see it more in her son than in herself.

I have tried to be clear with myself about the uncomfortable feeling I am having, the remaining task is to be able to verbalize these thoughts in an articulate way.

My first sowing of cowpeas are just beginning to bloom. Rufaro, are there any leaves in this pic that you would not dry for later cooking? I don't think any of them are old enough to have a 'tough' texture yet. The newest leaves are distinctly shinier in person.

Rufaro Makamure wrote:I  want us to honestly talk about with our guards down and see if we can change things....
One problem I am sure about is that we have some kind of broken communication.
...
I have tried to be clear with myself about the uncomfortable feeling I am having, the remaining task is to be able to verbalize these thoughts in an articulate way.

I was thinking of you today as I cancelled a contract with a service provider over poor services and lack of respect, but tried to do it in a way that respected everyone.
I admire your concern for mai Kumbi and genuine wish to work together with her for the good of everyone (her, her family, and you as well). I hope you can sort things out so respect goes both ways and everyone benefits.

Joylynn Hardesty wrote:My first sowing of cowpeas are just beginning to bloom. Rufaro, are there any leaves in this pic that you would not dry for later cooking? I don't think any of them are old enough to have a 'tough' texture yet. The newest leaves are distinctly shinier in person.

The shiny ones are the only ones you want. The older ones are already tough. And the other way to check is , those you can literally pinch off from the vine using your index finger and thumb, they are still tender.
*Don't forget to boil them before drying.

My meeting went well. The major thing we had to deal with was how to handle conflict. We agreed not to fear conflict but to embrace it and learn to listen to each other in those times of conflict, because those are the times we will realize true growth. I am not going to automatically assume that when we are not agreeing, she is intentionally disrespecting me and she is not going to always assume that when we are in disagreement I will chase her out of the house. Instead we will focus on a common goal and try to listen to each other's perspectives with regards to our goal.

We will work on our communication and we are concentrating on feeding the onions using teas, ash and manure.

I was going around the yard at the plot and I had one of my proud moments. We have had one of the years with the most weeds/ organic material inside our yard. When I say weeds it's like a bad thing, to me it is not, it's an achievement. Mai Kumbi and her family have started slashing the weeds in the maize field. When it's not the rainy season it's so hard to believe that it is a field, the weeds that grow in it are just a lot and so dense, and it shows so much diversity and life in the soil (I think). All of the weeds from the field are going to the onions and choumollier beds. We have had little need to find organic matter outside the yard for our weed tea and for mulching.

The available labor is beginning to make some sense now. The onions beds are turning greener by the day and, growing and maintaining the onions has very little strain this time, in terms of planning and convincing my now work partners, that we need to give our all to growing the onions. I feel that I was able to be a little flexible with my ideas, for example I kept on wanting to inter-crop things and because we are still learning how to grow things especially the unconventional way we would end up not benefiting much from my experiments. This year I decided to plant just onions,
1)  because they have been the easiest for us to grow,  they don't demand a lot of maintenance.
2) we will be able to sell them at a manageable pace because onions can keep longer before rotting, if they are dried well.
3) The growing time allows me to build the soil as we wait for the onions to mature.

Win...! Win...!Win...! Situation, for the soil, for me and for my partners. I am glad I have been at this for so many years and finally somethings are now shaping up. The global goals made so much sense to me and to kind of see that at the small level I am at, I have a contribution that I honestly feel is so important, no matter how small the level is, makes me very proud. I know I am contributing to
-No poverty
-zero hunger
-good health and well being
-quality education
-decent work and economic growth
-reduced inequalities
responsible consumption and production
-life on land
-peace, justice and strong institutions and saving the best for last, my favorite goal
-CLIMATE ACTION

I now need to have my A-game in terms of being profitable. It was easy to have people come and stay at our plot because they were coming for the house free accommodation. I had to sell the idea of the importance of the land for growing things. Now that the family that is there has caught on the bait, they now want the productive side of the plot more and they are adopting the regenerative methods. I went and found that they have been collecting ashes to put in the garden and their initiative to slash the field is so that they can get as much of the organic matter for teas and mulch. So I have to now look into things that will allow us to make sensible income to make them want this place even more.

I will write the flip side of the coin in my next thread. When good things are happening the difficult ones are also somewhere in the mix. Difficult in a normal "we are on earth, it's not a perfect place, kind of way", so I am still happy about so much progress.

I have always believed that there is fate. I believe in it more now, because of my niece's situation, the one in  Guruve. A couple of days back I realized that we have tried doing online lessons on and off and it was now straining, so I decided it might be more logical to just wait for her to come for holidays and we do the in person lessons. Her network is not reliable. She keeps reaching out for me to help her and today I was telling her the plan, for us to do an intense program during her holiday. She told me there are subjects they have to do at school, during the holiday, so that wthey can complete the syllabus. There is no way I can tell her to come home where we have a higher chance of making it, since it will be one on one lessons. Right now she says they haven't been doing English and Maths, one teacher is not present and the other teacher is just not attending class. How are they going to start caring during the holiday? I cannot tell her to come and not go to school because if she fails, she will blame me for the rest of her life. But I am not confident at how much she will benefit during one holiday, with people who are not taking things serious during the term.

Her schooling is now affected, not because of lack of money, or support or her lack of zeal towards school, it is just a series of multiple bad decisions that have been made and are being made by adults in her life, and there is also bad network. It's as if her life is shaping itself in a way that is outside anyone's control.

Today I have been working on the keyhole garden. The rats were/ are giving me problems and I tried multiple things to protect my plants, until l started covering plants with a plastic and every day in the morning I have to remove it to allow the plants to grow unobstructed. Only today did I look at the composting area and thought to cover the top, to stop the rats from accessing the kitchen waste. It's obviously embarrassing that it never occurred to me in all this time that rats might not frequent my garden if I get rid of the concentrated food source. People do gardening and rats do not eat growing vegetables, I started experiencing it in my garden and I think it has a lot to do with my design. What I am liking is that if it works,  my kitchen waste will not be a part of any chain that leads to a bigger problem. If I manage to keep it away from rats, I would have succeeded in not contributing to breeding of rats in our yard or any where else. Also the fact that I am not sending my kitchen waste away in the garbage, means I am not putting any input towards issues related to greenhouse gas emissions in landfills, that is, I'm not doing an out of sight out of mind problem solving approach.

I was working with my niece on report writing. She would write things that were a little extreme in her reports, extreme withing the context of the current lifestyle we are living. For example she was writing a report about a soccer team's activities and she would talk about the teachers donating money to buy a bus, as a way of supporting the team. I know it's all imaginary, but I also thought it has to be close to what is real. We then read a sample answer and there is nothing like extreme. It made me reflect on life, maybe an underlying thought can restrict growth. What if my approach here is how I handle life, that is, doing things that fall within the norm, in certain areas that affect growth especially in my project. I have always been open with myself about how my progress is too slow. The only problem is whatever is slowing things down is something I am not aware of yet and I suspect it has to do with my value system. I say this because, I think the only thing that can blind a person from true reality, is how one percieves life. So some things that determine my choices, might not even be right.

Today both mai Kumbi and Kumbi impressed me. Mai Moyo has started digging holes and I haven't been to the plot so they were concerned about the spacing of the holes and they raised this concern with me. This is exactly what I wanted. They had no business in the field but because they are close to it and they can, they took their time to just see whether things were being done right, without me telling them to. It feels like the place and what we are doing is growing to be ours and not just my things.

My niece's situation is weighing on me heavily. I had hung my boots and had decided to not be too involved in her school work. It is an option and an easy one, and deep down in my heart it felt as if I am letting her down, because my decision in this is based on fear. I was afraid to let her know how I truly felt, in case she will blame me if she doesn't pass, after I would have taken her for lessons, during the holiday.

This nagging feeling led me to call her and tell her she has two options to go to school and to come home and learn. School is good because the teachers want to finish their syllabus, and she will be with others,  which will give her some comfort and confidence. The down side is that, she might not get individual attention and my concern is that, she might have it on record that she completed her syllabus, but   what good will it be to her to finish a syllabus and probably not grasp anything. I told her she is now an adult and she needs to know that she has a choice which, only she can make. She told me after looking at the pros and cons of both options she is now choosing to come home. When I talked to my sisters they were suspecting that she might be saying things just to please me and, like me before, they think she is better off at school so that she does not blame me in the future.

I called her again to make her know that she is genuinely free to choose what she needs to do and, she wants to come home. I am looking at the scholarship she stands to loose and I am choosing to take the risk of teaching her some subjects and have her get teachers around me to help her with the other ones, because I strongly feel she has a better chance with me.

The lid for the kitchen waste area worked so well and it made me think of fencing the vegetable plants. I was not too successful with the spinach, that I planted in the keyhole garden. It grew nicely, but the rats were eating the leaves. I had started covering the plants with plastic daily, every evening, and I would uncover it in the mornings. The plants seemed to have stunted growth and I suspected that, what I was doing had a lot to do with this.

I covered one area first and it seems to be working, so I covered the other part yesterday. This side does not have a proper support / wall, so there are some areas that allow rats to dig in, through the sides. So I still need to look into this.

The tomato plant was doing well throughout winter,  we have not yet started buying tomatoes. It now has some disease, it's older leaves dry up and it does not flower as much any more.

I mentioned earlier that I would write about things that are outside my control. Two of them are, rats in the keyhole garden and litter in my neighborhood. Both these situations, had seemed to be things I needed to learn to live with, but I seem to be finding solutions to these issues.

Today, I found that rats have started eating tomatoes, which is something they had never done in the keyhole garden. It's frustrating because I have to continue to find a way around them, but it's also an indication that I have succeeded in covering up the other food sources for them and they are now looking for new alternatives. I added peanut butter to my trap, which was no longer drowning any rats, and my hope is, if the aroma of peanut butter is strong enough, rats will again be tempted towards it.

Then with the litter issue, I had talked to an influential city council contact I had, to see if as an ordinary person I could give ideas and participate in finding a solution to littering. This didn't go anywhere. Today I saw a bunch of city council workers clearing the random dumping sites that were started by people. I had a chat with one lady and she says she is willing to hear from me, because for now, all they can do is to burn the litter, but by the end of the day there will be people who will have dumped litter on these spaces again. If what I propose makes sense she can help me from the city council's side. So I am glad that two of my uncontrollable issues might change into controllable ones.

I took a shot of the illegal dumping space, a pile of waste is starting already. Its been only four days after the place was cleared. We have a dump truck that goes round weekly to collect garbage and households only need to put their bins outside and the waste is collected. This is the original way that waste was removed from my neighborhood. It was rare for the local city council to have people go round, burning waste from random dumpsites as a routine because illegal dumpsites were not common.

We have a lot of things that have gone wrong systematically in how most institutions are run, but the local dump trucks have been closer to reliable than not. Most of the waste that is lying around, is a problem that definitely can be avoided. We can choose to blame the government or the economy but I believe we will be choosing to be unaccountable for some things we need to be accountable for. We end up with diseases like cholera and malaria that spread really fast, if ever there is an outbreak and these are some of the reasons why. The cost that comes with some of these choices have impacts that are so big.

For example the resources that are put by the local city council to manage things when there is a cholera outbreak are increased and we are talking about an institution that is already strained financially. The resources are sourced from the government and NGOs also help which means a small household decision, would have caused an impact that gets to the national level and because of NGO involvement, which is really substantial in these cases, it becomes a global thing.

What if every single capable adult makes responsible choices wherever they are at whichever level, how much money could we save. I will try working with the lady I found from the city council and I am hopeful that one day, there will be a difference I can make. If it's not this way, I will wait for another opportunity to present itself.

Today I am writing two posts, I  have two completely unrelated issues. My second issue is something I found out which is confusing me.

In the past week, I had to teach my niece how to write  an article, which is something I probably had forgotten about or I never knew. This meant  some research on my part. When we started l this home schooling arrangement, one thing was that my niece and her family would be responsible for looking for material to use, including reading material  and my job is to try and understand the material enough for me to teach it. So in the books we had, hard and soft copies, we could not get the article format. Then my niece remembered that there was a composition exercise book she had, with notes and exercises she did with a teacher who was taking her for extra lessons last year. They had covered articles. When she brought the book I was confused. She had very good compositions with very high marks and it made no sense how she came from such a perfect composition writing place to where she was now. The other thing was her english then,  from just talking to her was no where near what was in her composition books.

I asked how she got her marks and she told me, they were given work in class and they submitted their books and she would get the good marks. It took us a while to understand each other, she didn't get why I was bothered and why her answer wasn't good enough. I later understood that when she was saying she was given work, her English teacher would dictate a composition, helping her with spellings and punctuations and then he would mark his own composition, the only thing was, it would be in my niece's handwriting. Why would anyone in the world do something like this?

She did not know most meanings of words she would be writing, she would not even understand the topic they would be writing about, or why the punctuations were the way they were.  I do not get what this man was doing at all