Today I fell asleep on the bumpiest road so far – big pot holes, lots of dust, we even got stuck in a dry river bed – but jet lag hit (I didn’t sleep last night) and on our four-hour drive I managed to snooze. I think I impressed the people I was with by my ability to nod off, I seriously hope I didn’t snore.

Eventually we arrived in Ward 6 Guruve – close to the border with Mozambique to see a project working on water harvesting, agriculture and animal health. I met a lovely woman farmer with a great name, Breakfast Feresia. She told me that the Practical Action project had resulted in “people having enough food and our animals also having enough to eat as we now feed improved crop residue – so there is food for people and feed for our animals”. I thought that was a great way of summing up twhat the project has achieved.

Alongisde our normal tried and trusted work, one of the strange things we have been trying in this project is podcasting. People who know me would probably describe me as an odd mix – a sceptical enthusast – and it’s true! Scepticism was winning with pod casting – how could MP3 players be an appropriate technology? Well today I discovered pod casting is appropriate, in fact the community I met think its brilliant! As they said: “Human extension workers who try to give us lessons can forget, they say things differently each time and sometimes they just have bad days. This can’t have a bad day and it says the same thing every time, we can also listen to it time and time again until we learn.” So I am switching and becoming an enthusiast for pod casting. I am always willing to learn.

If I can get this picture to attach I have a challenge for you – what is this piece of appropriate technology we used today? (Roll your mouse/cursor over the picture for the answer!)

Great work, a very long day and still jet lagged, must now go and try and get some sleep.

Margaret

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 8:04 pm and is filed under Field reports, Zimbabwe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.