TCE Mazabuka, Zambia

TCE Mazabuka, Zambia. It seems we are the only DI’s on the four country plan. Our stay here at this project makes this our fifth project in the last eight months, and our fourth country to do work in since we arrived in Africa. Our African Adventure certainly hasn’t gone as planned, hasn’t been what I expected, but then if it had been I guess it wouldn’t have been an adventure.

Mazabuka is a medium sized town two hours south of Zambia’s capital, Lusaka in the Southern Province. It, like Katima, is basically a one street town with a few small shops, a pharmacy, and a big grocery store; the one luxury is the pizza restaurant on the corner. The TCE project here is the only TCE project in the country and it is treated as a model project – as a result it gets many visitors both international and governmental. In truth it is a bit of a model project which was very refreshing and a bit shocking when we first arrived. Brian and I signed up as volunteers with Humana / DAPP, whatever you want to call it because we specifically wanted to work with its TCE program – it seemed like the best designed and most potentially sustainable program we could find. I am still positive that every TCE program benefits the communities they are in, that the communities are better off for having the program, but the impact the project has in a given area depends heavily on how professionally and competently it is run. Katima has a long way to go but is getting on the right track. I have now seen the potential that the TCE program has from being here in Mazabuka and for that I am glad that I came to Zambia. The Mazabuka TCE is run as close to the way the literature says it does as is possible. The staff here are mature, motivated and capable and the Field Officers seem to be making a real concerted difference in their communities in a pretty holistic way, from working with headman, clinic officers and local schools to educating, testing and arranging for care and support to community members. I have taken a lot of notes here.

Although we are not this projects DI’s we have not been sitting around. In the three short weeks that we have been here we have managed, I’m not sure how, to become the go-to DI’s even though the project has three of their own DI’s here. Two days into our trip the whole office had to arrange for a last minute visit from a CDC representative (Fun Fact: the American CDC funds A LOT of things in Africa, including most of the TCE projects. Who knew? They also are largely responsible for most of the free healthcare and medication in Namibia, which I think is very important but can’t help but notice that my government is paying for almost universal healthcare for Namibians while I, an American citizen, do not have health insurance and cannot afford healthcare at home). Anyway, Brian was asked to go into the field to make sure everything was ready for the representatives and he ended up kind of taking over on that end. The next day the two of us accompanied the Project Leader and the representatives in the office and during their short field visit where they sat in on a testing session and heard from some TCE Passionates. It was a great experience for me not only to meet someone from the CDC but to see how these things work.

During our stay here we have also been trying to transfer some of our knowledge and things that we have been working on in the various countries we have been to. Last Wednesday we taught a course about the link between HIV and poverty, which in large part explains why the HIV epidemic is so disproportionately in Southern Africa. We taught the course to TCE Peer Educators, who are community members who earn a stipend to do things like teach courses to high risk populations like migrant workers. Some of the Peer Educators themselves are former sex workers who have given up the trade after getting involved with TCE, which I think is pretty cool.

I think the most important thing we have done during our time in Zambia has been to introduce our database system to the project. During our field visits we both noticed that the one weakness of the project was in monitoring and evaluation – for the most part Field Officers are doing their job but there is no paperwork to back up their statistics, meaning there is huge room for making stuff up. The management here, unlike in Namibia, was more than open to our suggestions and we pitched our system to the entire staff, who liked it. So we trained four staff members on how to use the system and are in the process of setting it up here. They are going to roll the system out for the whole project, which will be three Troops. The database system is boring and a pain to set up but I am convinced that it will make a huge difference in the monitoring and evaluation abilities of the project. It is not glamorous or heart-wrenching development work but I think it is sustainable project development work that justifies the presence of skilled Western volunteers, something which I have sometimes questioned.

The rollout of our database system here in Zambia also in a way makes things come full circle as we near the end of our trip. I first started developing a basic database system in Outapi as a way of familiarizing myself with the project. In Katima Brian and I introduced it as well and started linking information to make the information more usable. It is nice to know that even though we have been moved from project to project and haven’t been able to stay at a project long enough to do big things, the work that we have done hasn’t been for nothing. In fact, almost all the things we have developed throughout the various pit stops on this journey have proved useful elsewhere. Thus the Basic Business Course we started working on in IICD and developed fully in South Africa was used to train Support Group members in Outapi and will be given to the project management here in Zambia to use to train their clients. And the practice lesson on HIV and Behavior Change that we spent days working on in Massachusetts has been taken apart and refitted to make countless lessons on Basic HIV, HIV and Poverty, and Positive Living courses that have reached hundreds and hundreds of people. So it is a good feeling that the weeks and weeks of doing boring database work in Outapi and Katima is not for nothing. Perhaps the irony of this strange adventure is that after training for work in Namibia the greatest sustainable impact we will have had in Africa will have been in the strengthening of monitoring and evaluation systems in Zambia.

P.S. News about our visa and timescale in Africa should be coming soon.