Palo Daka EWB
Dec 24, 2005
By: John Coy


“This Nshima tastes like hand sanitizer,” said Paul Slomp, he continues to eat however not wanting to west the last of my breakfasts that I couldn’t finish. It was a breakfast of Seema or Nshima, a food mad of pounded maze (corn) boiled into a mashed-potato-like substance and bananas squished together and eaten with our slightly dirty hands. Nshima is eaten with out the use of utensils and with the tips of the fingers on the right hand; for almost all Zambians it is not only the staple of their diet it is the only meal they can hope to find regularly.

However this year many hope in vain as roughly two million of them are expected to suffer malnutrition this year due to a drought that devastated maze crops throughout most of the African country. That is innless something is done. Climate change is suspected as the being one of the culprits for the drought and resulting famine.

Nshima is eaten with a vegetable relish or cooked met if it can be afforded. Food is a big deal her, its kind of a sacristy… this how ever is not because Zambia is low on arable land or because Zambia is over-crowded with people. No, nether of these things are particularly true. Zambia is a country regarded as having ample natural resources and
food crops, however its people are quite poor, 86% of Zambians live below the poverty line.

The average Zambian baby can expect to work hard in the fields, live a life of poverty and die at the age of 32 because of preventable diseases like HIV-AID’s or treatable sickness like tuberculoses or malaria. The average life expectancy in Zambia is the lowest in the world at 32.7 years in Canada its 80.1 years.

Explanations for the short Zambian life span rang wildly from criticisms on the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP’s) that where imposed on Zambia during the eighties by the IMF and World Bank, to the idea that its current stat of depravity is due to economic sacrifices the country made during its fight for independence from colonial Britain (an era called Cha Cha Cha) which succeeded in 1964 and backing South africa’s, Angola’s, Zimbabwe’s, Tanzania’s, Malawi’s and Mozambique’s own fights for independence.
Whatever the reason, Zambia’s currant problems relating to the short life expectancy of its inhabitance are widely agreed as being a lack of healthcare, lack of sanitization (which is important because Nshima is eaten with the hands), lack of safe drinking water, the fast growing HIV and AIDS epidemic and a lack of mosquito nets to prevent malaria (nets
that cover the sleeping area and prevent mosquitoes from entering).

The specific types of mosquito that carries malaria, which kills more then a million-people a year, the female Anopheles Freebrni and Gambiae, only bit between the hours of 6:00Pm to 6:00Am when most people are sleeping.

Slomp works as an Engineers Without Borders Canada volunteer closely with a charity called International Development Enterprises (IDE) in Zambia. IDE distributes and largely subsidies, foot pedal driven treadle water pumps to small rural communities and rural subsistent farmers;
these are also the people that are most at risk of dying of starvation or malnourishment this year because of the drought over the past 10 months.

Treadle pumps, pump water to irrigate fields which intern makes the plants grow even in a drought, which makes food, which saves lives.

Paul Slomp or as most Zambians know him by Palo Daka, which is his nametranslated into the local language Nyanja, lives like the people he helps. He lives in Pashane Village a community with 300 residents comprised of a handful of subsistent farming families in a small two-room hut given to him by Shawa of the Angoni Tribe the headman of the village. He was lent his hut in exchange for running a development
program with the residents on the weekends.

Slomp grows his own maze, sunflower, groundnuts and soy on a half hectare of land that was lent to him for his stay of three years in the village by a local farmer. Slomp uses the land to contribute to his sparse food supply.

Tending to his farm and to the people of the village both of which are currently suffering from the short and long term hardships of drought takes up all of his Sundays and Saturdays, during the week he works as an Engineers Without Borders Canada volunteer in partnership with IDE
full time. He has a degree in civic engineering from the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

“I went from farming in rural Alberta to farming in rural Africa - I
don’t know how many people make that transition,” Slomp says with his thick Albertan accent as he culls some heads of maze from his drought-stunted crop.

Slomp grew up the son of a dairy farmer in Rimbey, Alberta, population 2100. He emigrated from the Netherlands when he was eight years old, now 24 years of age he can be found towering over his drought affected and pathetically small sunflower plants at six feet two and one half inches
(1.91 meters) tall.

Slomp has a reputation with the people he works with: rarely stops, he is just a rural farm life-improving machine let lose on rural Chipata in Zambia near the Malawi border.



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