â€My legs are hurting a little tonight†says Mutinta, as we engage in a chat with her around the kitchen fireplace a winter evening in the village of Chalimongela in
Zambia’s Southern Province.
Mutinta who is district chairperson in “Women for Change†is responsible for 83 local groups. She has just come back
from a 2-day visit to one of the groups, 5 hours walk from her home. With her on the trip she had her 6 month old daughter and a bag with the most necessary clothing and other items needed at this
cold but dry time of the year.Village with school and waterMutinta is from the larger city of Choma on Zambia’s East-West main road. Here she got her
education, which is now benefitting her in Chalimongela, 110 km. into the bush. Her husband is a teacher at the local government school, which was built 15 years ago after strong pressure from the
local “Women for Change†area associations. They no longer found it acceptable that their children had to walk 20 km each way to school.
A borehole was dug in the
village a couple of years ago thanks to funds that came from Denmark through DanChurchAid. A small stone slab at the pump indicates that it was donated by Ms. Lisbeth Sørensen. Now they
only need a clinic. The closest one is 40 km. away. It is no joke, if you fall seriously ill and have to be transported there by ox cart.Making a difference in spite of
bad phone connections
Mutinta and her husband are happy to live in Chalimongela. They can see that they can
make a difference by teaching the children and by contributing to local development through “Women for Change†which bases its work on the concept of gender equality.
Their salary is small, but they can grow their own food and thanks to a small solar panel on the roof of their house they have electric light and can watch some television.
Telephone connection is
somewhat more cumbersome: Mutinta has to stand on some bricks on a certain spot in the village in order to have a network connection. She is not always able to make appointments with the local groups
before she starts on her tours.Strong community spiritThe community spirit in the village means a lot to them. Here people care about each other. They are engaged in
numerous communal construction activities: a food bank to store their surplus maize, well protected from weather and animals who otherwise take their share of the harvest under more traditional
storage methods. They are also constructing a chicken run, aiming at producing 100 village chicken a month for sale. The profit will help to support the many orphans with food and costs related to
their schooling. Many children have lost one or both parents due to AIDS.Male member of "Women for Change"Here we also meet Emerson â€" also called
Samson. He is also a member of “Women for Changeâ€. He has also received education and has worked for some years in the capital, Lusaka. But life in the slums of the
big city was too uncertain: how would he care for himself and his family when he grew old?
He therefore chose to return to the village where the headman allocated a piece of land to him, by means of
which he can now support his wife and 4 children. He has 7 cattle, 26 goats and a host of chicken that mill around the homestead.
He
earns a bit of cash by extracting tin with a pick and shovel in a small mine in the mountains some kilometres away. This is hard work and he gets USD 2 for a kilo of almost pure tin from the middle
men, who buy it from him and bring it to Lusaka.Family is importantOnce a year - in the dry season â€" when there is not much work to do on the farm, Emerson
brings together his whole enlarged family. He underlines the importance of knowing ones family roots and maintaining relations.
When his children reach the age of marriage, he wishes that they will
â€" as he did â€" stay with their parents at the homestead for the first few years of their marriage. In this way they will learn how to manage as a family, before they get their
own land and build their own huts.Uffe Gjerding DanChurchAid Country Representative in Zambia
[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]
A farmer shouts anti-government slogans during a protest in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh July 21, 2009. Farmers on Tuesday held a protest demanding eight hour supply of electricity on ...
