Don
Lotter Africa Blog
(Apologies for primitive format of this blog - I still write in straight HTML and haven't had time to upgrade my skills)
January 2012 - I'm fully engaged in research, grant writing, and university development at St. John's University.
Research projects:
1) Biomass-gasifying pyrolytic stove project (see below)
2) Research survey "Socio-economic impacts of a sand dam project" (see below for blog entry and pics);
3)Follow-up survey of African indigenous vegetable development - a USAID/HortCRSP project;
Biomass-gasifying pyrolytic stove project - Eric Reynolds, with whom I grew up in Davis, has moved to Rwanda and initiated quite simply the most exciting project I have yet seen in Africa - introducing the pyrolytic stove via a "social business" model (not a handout, it's a business). Read my PowerPoint presentation on the Pyrolytic Stove and about Eric's Inyenyeri Stove Project written up by one of the New York Times top blogs (Nick Kristoff).
Here at St. John's University, we need to find funding to introduce the stove to Tanzania - first needs are tools to start a demonstration/research program: 1) small hammer mill ($450), 2) small pelletizer ($850), 3) demo stoves (done!), 4) a volunteer who can help coordinate this project!
University development projects:
1) Developing a system for "Scantron" type automated grading via scanner - Scantron is too expensive so we are buying PrintScanScore (zipscan.com) - we have classes of 900 students and no TA's to grade the written exams - my colleagues are each spending about 75 hours (!) grading the written exams - when they assigned me one of these classes for next semester I said to myself "No way am I going to hand grade 900 written exams" - so I researched automated grading and showed an evaluation of it - everyone is begging me to implement it to free them from the mind-numbing task of hand grading - I never used multiple choice exams in my teaching in California, but with classes of 800+ and no TA's, it's the only way to go - assessment of student learning will be better because more exams can be given, and hand grading 400+ essay exams dulls the mind so much that any creativity by the student is not recognized and assessment is poor.
2) Other projects: Migrating IDS faculty to MS Outlook email (so that they check their email more than once a week; e-book access for the SJUT library
March 2011 - I've started a faculty position at St. John's University of Tanzania, in Dodoma (central Tanzania). Pictures - Dodoma 2011.
March 2011 - Finishing work with Mennonite Central Committee on sand dams for villages outside of Dodoma. See the Sand Dam Blog I did on the project. There is a link to a Google Earth view, plus slide shows. My work is on tree and grass planting for erosion control around the dams and on working with villagers on their crops.
February 2011 - I gave a talk at the ECHO East Africa Conference on Sustainable Agriculture: Integrated Pest Management for Low Input Vegetable Production in East Africa. Uploaded to Youtube for the conference participants.
January 2011 - I am in Dodoma, Tanzania on a two month contract to work with the Mennonite Central Committee on sand dams for village water supply.
December 2010 - My Dad, brother Mike, and Mike's partner Beth came for two weeks. Dad is 86 years old! Here are photos of the visit that Beth took.
November 2010 - I am finishing up my one year volunteer position with Food Water Shelter Pics of year 2010 with FoodWaterShelter Arusha here.
Transitioning to paid work with a couple of US-funded NGOs - Global Service Corps and Fintrac, on linking small-scale vegetable farmers to markets. This will start in January.
I've just had published an article Making connections to healthy soils, sustainable agriculture in East Africa. In Biocycle magazine.
June 2010 The organic vegetable farm has been a success, with a great response from people in
Arusha, mostly expats but also about 15% local higher income Tanzanians. Demand exceeds supply. Pesticides that are banned in the US and
Europe are used here by even the smallest farmers of vegetables. Many people want food that hasn’t been
sprayed with these things. The myth
still goes around that when you see peasant women selling veggies in the market,
that they are unsprayed. Many of the
indigenous veggie crops are unsprayed, like the African nightshade greens,
Amaranth greens etc. Incidentally, it
was the Mayan people in Guatemala who introduced me to nightshade greens – now
one of my favorite vegetables – great nutritional benefits. North Americans and Europeans still don’t
grow it.
I’m now starting to look at what to do next year. I will need a paying job. I may stay here if I can get something. I don’t limit myself to organic farming.
I lost my main farm manager and had to pick up Swahili much
faster than I had planned. I now manage the farm 90% of the time in
Swahili. Growing a wide range of vegetable crops organically here can be
a challenge. Disease and insects have hit my tomatoes and cucurbit crops
pretty hard, and we can't get the old-standby organic sprays like Bt for
insects and the Bordeaux mixes for fungal diseases. So I've been trying
different biologicals - neem, chili and garlic, turmeric, compost teas, and milk,
to name a few.
Anyone who has had success with controlling insects and disease in humid with
locally available compounds, please let me know the recipes.
The NGO that I volunteer for, foodwatershelter (no caps, one word) is dynamic
and young and I think is doing a great job. The young Australians with
whom I live are fun and flexible, putting up with my oldness and occasional
grouchiness quite well. Concomitantly, I put up with such unspeakably
atrocious habits not rinsing dishes after washing with soap (and they're a wine
country! but I suppose it's reflective of being from a water scarce land) and
pronouncing the simple word "no" as if they're being tortured
(something like "naaaarrrrrgggghhhhhh".
I'm going to Dar for the SabaSaba trade show in July and to try and
once-and-for-all get my long-term volunteer visa. I will finish the trip
with some vacation time on the coast at a camping resort where I will watch the
last 4-5 days of the World Cup soccer. People tell me that Peponi Resort
in Pangani is good for budget travelers like me. Any ideas out there on
where to go?
The Story of a Long Lost Song, Found 37 Years
Later. I have to tell this story. Back in my hitchhiking days, it was 1973, in
northern South Africa, I was picked up by a family – the Mullers (Max and Anne
Muller, Etienne Muller, Joanne Muller, they now live in Ireland I believe), and
taken to their farm, where I stayed for a month (some pics from those days are
on the family album, linked below). They
had music LPs and one of them was by a guy named Rodriguez, an unknown American
from Detroit. On that album was a
hauntingly beautiful song – Sugar Man. After getting back to the States I looked for that song every once in a
while but finally gave up by the 1990s. Rodriguez was and is still unknown in the US. Then a couple of weeks ago one of my
Australian colleagues put on a mix of music in the lounge area we share – and
there it was – Sugar Man. I knew it
immediately, even 37 years later. I had
been searching for “Candy Man” all those years and so couldn’t find it. It turns out that in South Africa and
Australia, Rodriguez has always had a following. I’ve taken the liberty to put up Sugar Man for you to hear, recorded in Detroit in 1970, in
its original raw form. His music is now available
on Amazon. I figure some
people will buy the album so I think it’s alright to put up the song.
March 2010 - In my 4th month. Starting an organic vegetable farm from scratch. Google Earth view here.
December 2009
In October I did a consulting gig in Tanzania for the US NGO
Farmer to Farmer, advising farmers on their production of vegetable
crops. I decided to come back to live here. Below is my newsletter.
Hello friends - I am on a month-long volunteer project in
Tanzania with the Farmer-To-Farmer organization, a US NGO. I'm
based in Arusha and get driven out to farming areas around Mt. Meru,
where the farmers, all very small-scale, grow cool-season crops at the
high altitudes there (snow and sugar-snap peas, string beans, baby
carrots). The crops are destined for the European market, something
that I hesitated about, as flying produce from the equator to Europe is
not sustainable in the long-term due to the high carbon footprint .
However, I really needed something like this to get a break from the
miserable job situation in California. Plus, these farmers, all
small-scale and whose land holdings average less than an acre, are
determined to make some cash from connecting to this market. The east
African markets are too poor for them to make any money. A few locally-owned
export companies have formed here and have given the farmers a framework,
very strict rules, to produce. It's not organic, but the farmers
don't do any of the spraying - a spray manager is trained by the export
company so that the rigorous European standards can be adhered to. The
farmers have formed co-ops in order to deal with the need to scale up for
export.
I have been teaching them about green manure crops (cover
cropping) and ecological pest management. They have responded much
more positively than I had thought they would. They have only been
farming like this for a generation or so, formerly having done nomadic
livestock herding and shifting cultivation, neither of which are viable
any more given population growth, so they do need help with maintaining
and building soil fertility and arthropod (insect) stability. Their
soils are really low in organic matter due to over a decade of chemical
fertilizer use with inadequate organic matter inputs.
Pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/dwlotter/TanzaniaSmall?authkey=Gv1sRgCLb6-OPYsNb-aw&feat=directlink
The last time I was in Arusha was in 1966 when I was 13
years old, when we were on safari from Peace Corps staffing in
Malawi. Arusha has now grown 30-fold and is unrecognizable.
All that us Lotter boys remember about Arusha is that two east Indian
merchants had an ice cream store that made chocolate milk shakes, and as
I recall (possibly unreliably), hamburgers. This was just the greatest
thing in the world for us boys. We drove through all of the game
parks, camped, were chased by rhinos and elephants, bitten by scorpions
(Scott), broke down in the bush and rescued by a "great white
hunter" and taken to his camp, which was invaded by a pride of lions
the night after we left (all in my mom's book To Africa With Spatula,
check it out on Amazon). I have been able to see some animals on
the way to one of my farming areas, in pictures above.
More pics of the Lotters in Africa 1965-67 at http://picasaweb.google.com/dwlotter/1_LotterSlideShow?authkey=Gv1sRgCMW37rzatIWPwwE&feat=directlink
Scroll down. It's a large family album, the Africa pics are down a
little ways.
A couple of observations about East Africa in general.
Almost everything malfunctions here - it's the norm - whether it's
electricity or Internet or hotel room stuff or scheduling trips or
agricultural production - everything except, and it's a big
"except", the way people relate to each other (and to mzungus
like me), and that pretty much makes up for all of the
malfunctions. This is something that most journalists are not aware
of, it's not something that is clearly observable, it just has to be felt
over years of coming here.
The other thing is the really astounding effect of Barack
Obama on the people here. You hear his name mentioned by everyone
from four year olds in villages to old people (in Swahili, most people
don't speak English here). I was having some tailoring done by one
of the front-porch tailors you see all over Africa (guys with treadle
machines who rent a little space on the porch of a shop). The guy
didn't speak but two words of English and was from the interior, the
bush. When I told him in my tiny bit of Swahili that I'm from
California United States, I saw that it didn't register, so I said
"Obama my president". They guy's eyes immediately lit up
and he said "America!" and shook my hand. I'm accustomed
to saying "United States" because in Latin America, the word
"America" signifies both of the western hemisphere continents and is
a touchy subject there. In Africa, "America" is the
common word for United States.