permaculture advocate in Zimbabwe - too little/too much rain

I have not been to the plot for sometime, needing to clear my head and also revisit my life purpose and assessing whether I am on the right track with how I wish to live this life I have.

I'm also taking the chance to see if the plot works without my presence, following some of the unconventional methods I have spent years implementing. I met with Kumbi's mom in town and from our conversation which was just general, I picked that they are slowly buying the idea of intercropping plants. I had been growing beets with choumollier and I felt like the seedlings wouldn't be maintained properly so they would just die, and I think it's because beets aren't popular and also it was not making sense to both Kumbi and his mom, why we had to plant two different crops in one bed and they kept asking if we could have a bed specifically for beets. No matter how I tried explaining that we just wanted to see if intercropping worked it wouldn't change anything. That's when I decided to put leaf vegetables, rape and mustard greens, which are also very common and are as popular as choumollier in the market. They have started harvesting the few beds we did the sample on and now they are excited because we are getting sales from both choumollier and mustard plants. I noticed from the images Kumbi sent me, that, they are taking good care of the other seedling we planted in other beds so it's a relief. I have started buying the few beets that we grew, to show the potential beets have in the market, Kumbi's mom even sold a few to her friends, so after the leafy greens are a success, I will try again to add beets and also onions and carrots in the choumollier beds so that we will have variety.

Mai Kumbi has a lot of twigs for her rocket stove and she says she has reduced her gas and electrity bills. She now uses the rocket stove a lot. Later on when things stabilize on my side, she will be the best person to work with in spreading the use of a rocket stove in place of an  open fire because it actually works for her, lots of people are now going back to cooking with fire either because electricity or gas is too expensive for them or there won't be electricity due to load shedding and this means increased tree cutting. I know I won't need a big incentive for Mai Kumbi and once about 10 people enjoy the use of a rocket stove, I feel the concept will start spreading in its own.

In my personal life, I decided to cut ties with my university crush friend. I had managed to understand that he was now married and I had defined my boundaries, in our conversations. My concern was when I started missing him on the days we wouldn't talk. I don't think there is any innocent friendship like this, I think I like this man too much to be his friend. So to keep myself from disrespecting the marriage institution I had to stop talking to him and though a part of me feels like I have failed him, another tells me it's the only right thing for me to do.

I have realised a couple of things, you cannot do/ produce/ speak a language that you don't know and also that when components you need, inorder to produce something are not enough, it does not matter how much effort or passion you put in producing a thing, you will not have an output.

We have certainly moved a level up in terms of being productive at the plot. This project is no longer my project for sure, I am not the only one worrying about whether things work or not. It's now "we", who are interested in mixing different plants in one bed and communication is so  much better. We met with Kumbi today, and I am not the one who called for attention on an area that needs to be looked into, it's him. This is now our thing for sure. The seedlings we planted are being attacked by pests again and birds are giving us a difficult time on a particular portion of the field so we needed to discuss what we have to do to address these issues. It did not feel like a monologue today, but a dialogue.  Also Kumbi requested for beetroots...!!!, It was music to my ears. You cannot force anything on anyone and I believe all you can do is to wait for someone to understand things the way you do or for you to understand what the other person is trying to put across. I was so happy that mixed farming was bought, it is an idea I believed in but I also am very new to it and I am glad we have tried it to a point where my partners also see light in it, the only thing that was left was for me to now open my mind up to the possibility if me being wrong about all this.

Progress is veeeery slow since I started all this but I think it's legitimately and permanently progress towards the direction I am hoping for. Literally it could be a scenario of "slow but sure".

A lot of expansion is happening at home as we proceed. Our place is a little bit of everything now, hospital, school, source of sustenance  as well as a place for resting, and following is why this is. At the beginning of the month my sister and I started taking care of a relative who is redoing her ordinary level. Caring for extended family was a common practice especially soon after the 80s, when people were moving from rural areas to towns, after independence. Now it is becoming rare, mainly because things are getting harder and the thought of adding an extra head in the house is not so easy.  We cannot say we planned for this, but we are glad we are an option that was worthy considering. Our parents took in a lot of their extended family and personally this is one of the things I admired about them, for them, progress was not about an individual  it involved family, so  a retake of such an opportunity is an honor actually. Just like how I feel growth into the new 'civilised'  way of doing things, could have been done better, I also look at how my parents helped their extended family and see room to improve and I am glad we got a chance to try out a different way. I feel love and Christianity then, centered on selflessness in an exaggerated way, where one ended up giving more than they could and also erasing their self value which is a fate  that fell on my parents and some of their peers. This time around when my aunt brought her child, we were clear about what we could cover financially as opposed to just taking up all the responsibility and financially we are not strained. What we had not been aware of is how our schools are like now, we just assumed standards were similar with what we had when we were in school, if anything we expected things to be a little better. After our cousin started going to school we learnt that for informal students (those repeating their ordinary level) their classes have no doors and windows and they have a make shift board. So far in the past month we can count the number of times her teachers have come for their classes. I quickly decided to do a lot of schooling at home and coincidentally work at the plot is becoming organised and in a day I have time for school. Our plan with my sister is for our cousin to write in November so that she does not have to spend the whole of next year on this which is a huge advantage financially on her parents and us, also it gives her time to proceed to the next phase in her life, a win win for everyone. We asked her parents to pay for this year's registration and they did, now the responsibility is on us to teach her at home as much as we can for her to write and pass. This is the part on school.

For the hospital part, we are living the lifestyle medicine life and we have adopted it as our way of life. We have changed a lot of how we relate with our food and cooking is now an important part of our day. My sister is losing weight, I now no longer have constipation (it used to be my normal) and we are paying attention to a lot of what our bodies are telling us. For my lump, I am currently putting a patch with castor oil and tumeric, until  I can get checked properly. I started this quite recently, so I have not yet noticed any changes. Whatever chance we get at preventing illness we will take it. If we can take care of our health, it will increase our stability.

At the plot, we are now also selling vegetables, to add to the sales Kumbi makes at the plot, this is because the vegetables we are now producing have gone beyond the plot market and my sister and I have to find a bigger market. So there is growth. Our banana plant is also giving us fruits. We have had a bunch already this year and now one is almost ripening and  there are three more  bunches in the tree, this is to just add on how small things can make a difference.  

Since we made a decision to put liquid manure weekly in our soil, we are keeping our ears open for any opportunity to get cheap manure.   We learnt that there's an abattoir that gives cow manure freely and we paid them a visit. We got quite a lot of manure though we had to pay the employees who attended us $5. They did tell us not to say because manure should be for free, and this was their money. I know one can say we shouldn't give them because we are kind of feeding a corrupt practice, but it's not as easy as that. If we choose to expose these guys, we will surely lose this opportunity because they are the ones on the ground who determine whether there is manure or not. The manure is cheaper than the one we were buying and I hear cow manure lasts longer than chicken manure that we have been buying, which could be cost effective in the long run. Not getting this manure is not a risk we want to take.

An area of growth on my part is, I was afraid of spending money, on myself or my individual project without having had an initial flow of money from the project itself, for me to be convinced that I could pay back the money. That is, even if on paper a project looked profitable, I would not risk taking money to fund the growth of the project. I think it's a good concept but it was leaning more to the extreme side because even if I would get money or have access to borrowing, I would not take the opportunity even if it meant fast tracking my project. My sister came into the picture and her approach is a little different, she is a 'live in the present' kind of person and I am learning to balance worrying about the future and being in the present. This growth has allowed us to take up the manure opportunity, I did not over think the costs involved, and now we stand a chance of benefiting more from our efforts.

This year is the year I feel my effort is being moulded into an understandable occupation. This thread and a couple that will follow will explain more on this. In this context, occupation is my contribution to the society I live in. First and  foremost my occupation should enable me to earn a living in order for me to be a responsible citizen. Second it has to contribute in a positive way, socially and economically. Lastly it has to follow regenerative principles. All this time I know that in my adult life  so far, I am failing to fit into any of the available occupations. As I was trying to clear what it is I refer to as an occupation and I came up with the above characteristics, there is every reason why I am failing to fit in and to an extent why everyone who can, goes out of the country. In my community we have drifted further away from the second and third points especially, and less jobs pay a decent salary. Though I couldn't spell it out before I am glad that I was brave enough to follow my gut and in the past years I subconsciously started to work on creating an occupation I feel is right for me. This topic was triggered by what I have been experiencing within my circle of influence of late. For the past seven days now, I haven't been able to go to the plot. One woman whom we had started selling vegetables to came looking for them, claiming that they were cheaper and if we could it would help if the vegetable supply was consistent. Another woman called me asking if I could give her a job, she is the one who helps me with digging holes in the field.  She could not get any jobs from anyone and was desperately looking for one. It made me realize that I am doing something that actually adds value and though my teaching is not to pat myself on the back, I really need this once in a while because there is not much validation or confirmation I get now and it's so easy to get to moments where quitting is an option (I will elaborate more on this because I was really becoming disheartened). My effort has not just been about reducing our impact on the environment, but also there is some social contribution.

I will start with the earning of a living part.
For the past two years now ( I am not too good with time frames, but appx), my sister and I have been getting an allowance from my other sister. After taking care of water and electricity bills, we would remain with a two digit amount that we had to stretch to cover our food, toiletries and other monthly basics for the two of us. We kept working  on the plot  until now when we have gotten a couple of things right and we have a consistent salary from the plot. It is a ridiculously small amount so I won't even mention it for the sake of my dignity. Though our salary is embarrassingly small it has been consistent and now it has started to grow. Since we started getting some salary from our work, we decided not to change our lifestyle (i.e, of living within the allowance constraints) so that we could save up money for things we felt we needed but would be too much to ask from our other sister. My sister needed a passport meaning she needed over US$170 for this and I needed money to fund the plot project, i.e, buying manure, seedlings, fuel, feed for ducks...e.t.c. My sister was able to get her passport from her savings and is working towards her next goal. I have been able to secure funds for the plot needs, to keep it going. I'm still working with small businesses, so my salary is a little more than my sister's. In terms of improving our quality of life, as of this week, I can now afford to add onto our money for buying vegetables montly. To me food is a priority since our lifestyle medicine program which is why I prioritized improving this part with my earnings. We are still far from normalizing what our basics should be, but we have surely grown.

Iam adding an image of one bed which looks a little neater now and it has beets, onions, choumollier and mustard. As I had suspected adding a different leafy vegetable in the beds made it easy to reinforce the idea of mixed farming Kumbi is now planning his beds with this idea in mind.

If I were an NGO, focusing on social development, I would be extremely happy right now because the stage I am at, at the plot, is presenting me with an opportunity to explore social development practically. I have a full opportunity to work on communication and possibly change perception and values related to it within our small group. Maybe if we start some change it will cause a bigger ripple effect.

As I mentioned I am now working with Kumbi and my sister. Kumbi's mum just helps us when she can. I talked about how bad my communication with Kumbi was but it has been improving. Starting from where I felt he disregarded everything I had to say and now he does some things that I would have proven work. But since the whole thing is experimental, I want more. I want us to be able to discuss ideas on what works and what doesn't because I know he has a lot of beautiful ideas. When his thoughts oppose mine (which is almost always) he sabotages my plans and I will have to put in extra energy and resources to get things going and the  frustrating thing is he never says when he disagrees with me. A couple of things happened in the past weeks and I got to a point where I was rethinking everything, especially working with him. I stopped going to the plot because I don't know how to handle things like this. I am not good in communication myself.
Then with my sister, I feel we need to work on changing an unintentional colonial mindset. Because this place is her parents' place and around here farm owners and workers, in my eyes, have a slave-master relationship. Because it's the norm, it's so easy to not see when you do this and this is what I am also working on as I am trying to fix communication for the 3 of us. At the moment I am trying to read about communication and hopefully come up with an ideal future in relation to this and then see if we cannot all discuss this and come up with measurable objectives we can trace, of us working towards communication in a regenerative system.
I also realized that since I proposed working with Kumbi the time they moved in, I have never checked with him if it's something he still wants.
There was a time when the mother mentioned how he has to listen to me because if he doesn't they won't have a place to stay which is not true, but then I didn't pay much attention to it.  
I did check with him and he wants this, so now I know that for the three of us there is something to lose, an income, if we don't create a productive environment so I am  likely to be listened to. I just hope I get my communication information gathered in time.

Though I am finding my feet again at the plot, I am continuing to work on the food I put on the table. We no longer eat for the sake of survival or to just please our palates, food now means a lot more than that. One way we would cut on electricity and gas expenses was by cooking food just for it to be edible. But now we cook our food until it's cooked, our starch especially, including dextrinizing all our grains, even if it means a slightly higher bill on electricity and gas.

Cooking now takes up a lot of time and it is something I need to balance with everything else, I am spending a lot of time cooking these days. The other issue is I am still working out a  
weekly menu that I don't have to think about and now that I can buy most of the basic food items to last for a month this is going to be easier.

I am also still consistent in teaching my cousin. She lacked almost all her basics including part of addition and subtraction in Maths. She was just going to write because she was being told to, but she knew she wasn't going to pass. We have class everyday at home for over 5hrs, she is a lot more confident in her maths and science now. She has to write 5 subjects and I hope we will be able to touch on the other subjects before her exams in October. For our classes I am constantly seeing things on myself I have to work on. I find it difficult to excuse myself if people visit, telling them I have a class and this has taken up some of our precious time and it's something I am learning to do now. I also find myself getting angry when I feel that Prisca, my cousin is not getting a concept I would have explained for hours on end. The lessons were really hard initially because she would get angry and uninterested when I kept pushing her to do things and I would get angry also. As we are getting to know each other we are getting to a point of good balance and I am learning not to be angry when she does not get a concept, I now try to find a different way of explaining.

My experience with her made me consider taking my other cousins to come for holidays for home schooling. Their family has been hit hard economically and I have noticed how with everyday that comes, the chances of my little cousins' lives turning into great ones are lessening. Their confidence is lowering, they are now constantly getting sick also. So I am thinking of having them come over during all holidays, so that the part of passing their final exams is  not going to be an uncertain thing and the earlier we start on this, the better. I am doing this for my sister also, the one who has been supporting us financially. If these little ones do not make it, the costs are likely to fall on her, that is if the parents need support, which is highly likely, if things remain as they are economically. So if I can lower medical bills and education bills through the environment I am creating at home, it will make me really proud and that's my way of paying my sister back for her help.

One thing though is now that Prisca is interested in school she comes even in the mornings with questions that she needs help with. I have put aside 3pm up to 10pm and sometimes 11pm for her school and everything else including the plot is between 5am and 3pm, in winter it's very difficult to wake up at 5am though. I wonder if it's wrong for me to tell her that inasmuch as I want her to pass and I am here for her I don't want her school to take every little second of my time when she is not at school. I understand life has not been fair to her because she was not equipped enough to sit for exams and it's not a mistake that she came to me (before this we had never met) I will do as much as I can within my capability to rectify this, but we still need to survive through me working, even if it's me researching whilst I am on my phone  and I need to cook,...e.t.c and I also need my alone time.

Are you aware of haybox cooking?

When you need  to cook something for a longer period of time, but want to save on energy, you heat the put up then place the whole pot in an insulated box. Because it keeps the heat in it stays hot and continues to cook.

There are lots of variations on how  to make the box, but they are very simple in principle.

Haybox cooking

They have added advantages as well, because the cook doesn't have to stay at the stove. You can prepare the meal and walk away for an hour or so to do other jobs.

Of course...!!! I saw it at Laurie and Brent's, a while back and I had forgotten about this. It is ideal for the wheat rice we are now cooking, it takes really long to cook and it tastes nice when it's really soft (at least for me).  Thanks for this.

The final part is the spiritual part. I am growing  the economical and social together with my own spiritual person. I had questioned religion for many years and I stopped believing in anything and had even stopped reading the bible totally for a long time. As I am healing my whole self, i.e., my mental, physical and spiritual self, I have had to choose my spirituality. I think there are many gods out there and everyone has the freedom to choose the one they want. I decided to stick to Christianity, a religion I was taught by my parents and I have been reading the bible everyday since March.

In cases where things get out of control or events happen especially bad ones, whether we deserve them or not, I found I am now a lot stable in handling these things. For example I find myself waking up in the night with my heart racing because of the fear that the guy who came banging at our door might come back. At some point I would fail to sleep but a few days ago when I was up, I thought of how I have to live in the moment and if anything happens it will be because God would have allowed it and all I need is his grace to live a good, happy, healthy and safe life. I instantly felt calm and I actually slept till the next morning.

So my journey in building a regenerative homestead is starting with me focusing and healing the center of my world, i.e., myself and if I succeed with this, it will grow into a snow ball effect and naturally spread to those around me and they will heal themselves as well as the land they are guardians to.

I have brought a mixture of maize and nyemba beans to the boil and I am letting this sit for the day. I am using our pressure cooker which stopped working for about a month now, as my heat retention container, until I make a haybox. I used plenty of cloths to wrap it with to keep in the heat longer. I will see how this turns out tomorrow.

My body mass has reduced since I have been on my new diet. It is good for my sister because her goal is to loose weight. I am just at the bottom of my good BMI range and the plan is to have more beans for protein, to help me build my body. The best I was doing now was to make soy milk for porridge and we had paused cooking beans frequently. This is one of the reasons I jumped at the haybox idea.

Looks perfect! We don't have an actual haybox, but I have done similar to this in the past - piling up cloths and stuff to keep a pot warm while I go out. It works well.

I was honest about how I am seeing things at the plot with respect to communication. I sent audios via WhatsApp, to Kumbi, I still do not have the guts to be confrontational like this face to face. He is angry... I do not think he would have such passion in his voice if he did not want this. I do not know how to handle this, so I am processing.

My grains are a little cooked, maize takes so much time to cook. I decided to bring them to the boil again, using gas, which is a lot more expensive than electricity and put them back in the 'haybox' as I wait for power to return (load shedding). I know it will take a lot less heat to finish off the cook.

I enjoyed lunch, it took a lot less to boil the grains. The stories Prisca was also telling made lunch time enjoyable. She was telling me how blank she was in her science paper exam and it's not something I should laugh about, but how she was telling the story made it really funny. In her class they had never seen instruments and apparatus that are used in the final exams and their teachers reserved a day towards their writing day to point at different apparatus and tell them the names. By the time the exam came they had forgotten most of the names. Then in the question paper where they would be instructed to measure, others would use rulers because that was the only thing that they knew measures things and it follows that whatever they would be measuring would be wrong, since they were supposed to measure things they needed to boil. They did not know what a water bath was and one of the teachers passed this comment "some of you guys will blow us up in this room because of the mixtures you are making". The kids had absolutely no clue what they were doing. I laughed but it is so unfair on the children really.