FIDP

It’s strange, having been in Peace Corps for almost two and a half years, to be in my third year of teaching. It seems I’ve finally gotten into the swing of things. Day to day I have a schedule, a routine hammered out. Yet, this is Malawi, and life here is always dynamic. You’ll be going along with everything completely ordinary and then out of the blue incredibly strange or extraordinary events will materialize, sometimes right outside your door.

One such event was when FIDP (Farmer Income Diversification Program), a joint venture between the Malawi government and the European Union, decided to launch phase two from my village. This means that the Minister of Agriculture, the Ambassador of the European Union, the local member of parliament, and several other Land Cruiser-driving dignitaries all showed up at my school, which was transformed into a veritable fairground, tents and all.

There were several things that were surreal about this festival. The first was the fact that it was held at my school, on our football pitch. So, all of sudden, our little patch of grass, where we’re used to playing football and netball, had several rows of grass-thatched display stations, a podium, several benches and chairs laid out behind and around the podium, a giant European Union flag, a giant Malawian flag (new design, of course) and over one side of the enclosure, four giant circus tents.

In preparation for the event, and for welcoming all the dignitaries, our road, which is quite frankly practically impassable during the rainy season, and which people have been lobbying to get paved for the last five years at least, was completely re-graded. This means that when all the dignitaries, etc. passed over it, they did not get the normal, and slightly more authentic, experience of coasting down a hill sideways and staring at the nearby foliage not to admire its beauty but to look for handholds, but rather a wonderful smooth ride along a very well-maintained road. Nice for them, I’m sure, but not exactly an accurate reflection of the life of their constituents, or the people they are trying help.

During the ceremony, the Minister of Agriculture (whose name is Margaret – pretty cool) spoke, as did the Ambassador for the EU and the MP. All of them had problems with the mike, and since two out of three spoke in Chichewa (although my village is Tumbuka, they were Chewas). I busied myself during their speeches by trying to count the number of Land Cruisers parked throughout the football and netball fields. I couldn’t. Both of the local traditional authorities were dressed in huge flowing robes with flat, round hats. Strange, when you consider that their regular attire is a suit. Although encouraged to sit with the various dignitaries, I chose to take my usual place among the hoi polloi (although I did manage to snag one of the cold bottles of water that was being passed out to all visitors – missed out on the soda and beer, though). Pretty soon, two children had settled into my lap, and soon after that they were asleep, leaving me to the awkward task of trying to constantly shift my legs into a comfortable position without waking them.

After all the speeches were done, the village had scheduled some dances and performances, which every school, including my own, had cancelled classes to practice for. However, it began to rain soon after the speeches were concluded and the various dignitaries all drove off in their Land Cruisers, over our newly graded road, back to Lilongwe, or Blantyre or Mzuzu, or whatever other city base they happened to call home.

On my walk home, I realized that although I have lived around several of their major project bases for over two years now, I don’t really know what FIDP does. A few weeks later, to remedy this situation, and also because I hadn’t chatted with her in a while, I went over to the house of one of my favorite women in village – an older lady who works extensively with FIDP.

She lives up and down a few hills away from my house. About twenty years ago she decided she wanted to get into farming and asked a chief for some land. The way she tells it, he gave her as much land as she could pace off, thinking it was bad land anyway, because it was on a hill and the soil wasn’t fertile. The first time I stepped foot on her land, a valley full of row upon row of diverse vegetation, which seems to magically appear out of the large swaths of forest, I thought I had stumbled upon the garden of Eden. It seemed to make sense that Eden would be nestled in a small country in Africa.

It is hard to describe how awesome this woman is. She teaches at the primary school, farms every day, and is a member of the smallholder cooperative, the farming organization that works with Mzuzu coffee. To see her re-enact her interactions with the chiefs as she asked them for land is hysterical.

When I came this time, she already had fresh pineapple cut up on the table, laid out for me to eat. I asked her how she had first become involved with FIDP and, gratifyingly enough, she launched into the story of her entire history with FIDP. Apparently, some environment workers had been asked to identify farmers who would be interested in growing different crops. For some reason unknown to her, and thus to me, they did not actually talk to the farmers, but instead they simply looked around at who was already growing different crops and gave their names to FIDP, who promptly dropped off different seeds.

Which meant that she woke up one day with around three hundred suckers (baby pineapples) which she had to plant almost immediately so they didn't go bad.  Now you can stand in back of her house, and look at seemingly unending stretch of pineapple plants. 

Her other garden, down in the woods across the street from her house, contains a more diverse assortment of crops, peanuts, coffee, apples, lemons, even young tree nurseries full of bluegums and pines. She also has fish ponds and beehives.

“I’ll try anything,” she says. “The people come to me saying I should try fish ponds, okay, now I have fish. They come saying I should grow coffee, okay, now I have coffee. Recently they came with Macadamia trees. Okay, I will grow those too.” As I left she loaded me down with fruit, mostly lemons, which she knows I like. I use them to make guacamole, something I’ve promised to teach her. As I cycled back home I pass at least six different FIDP signs. I realize I’ve passed these signs about twice a week for the past two weeks, but I still don’t know what varying levels of success these projects have had.

In the weeks after FIDP II, honey has started appearing in the market, filling tiny plastic bottles with FIDP labels made with the aid of a label maker donated by FIDP. They don’t sell particularly well, though. Money has been tight recently, civil servants haven’t been paid in two months, and farmers are having a tough time, since the value of tobacco and maize was low this year. Since honey is expensive, almost no one in a village can afford it, but getting it out to the city is a problem, the road, which stayed immaculate for two or three weeks, now having reverted to its original state of impassibility.