Lessons from Zambia
Lyn Schumaker writes about an initiative at Disley Meeting – supporting Zambian youth who are tackling climate change
A young Zambian girl sits on the ground, asking questions of her grandfather: ‘What was the weather like long ago’? ‘Kale kale (long ago), the rains arrived in October’, he says, ‘Now they often don’t come until November or even December’. ‘But what can we do?’ The old man shakes his head, ‘It is God who makes the weather’.
This scene took place in 2010 when a group of young people in Zambia conducted interviews about climate change within their own community. Kamanga is an impoverished suburb of Zambia’s capital city, Lusaka, which, like other places in the country, is already suffering the consequences of global climate change. Rising temperatures and erratic weather patterns have been particularly damaging in Zambia. Cities like Lusaka experience flooding every year. This often happens at the same time that rural areas, especially in the southern part of the country, suffer from drought and crop failure.
Unlike her grandfather, this young girl knows that climate change is caused by people, not God. But her power to do something about it is limited by the fact that she lives in the ‘global south’, in a country that has done practically nothing to cause climate change but has little influence on the wealthy, industrialised nations whose habits of production and consumption are responsible.
Inspiration
At Disley Meeting, in Cheshire, we have been encouraged and inspired in our efforts to tackle climate change by the commitments made in the 2011 Britain Yearly Meeting Epistle. We were especially stimulated by the thoughtful discussions of those of us who attended Yearly Meeting Gathering in Canterbury and heard Pam Lunn’s wonderful Swarthmore Lecture.
One cannot emphasise enough how important it is to work towards changing our everyday activities. Although it sometimes seems like drudgery to monitor our use of electricity and gas, limit our driving, insulate our homes and reduce our impact on the environment – this is essential to creating a new pattern of life that is more self-reliant, responsible and sustainable.
Sometimes, however, we are given the opportunity to reach beyond our own small sphere, to work with people from different countries and cultures to address what is, after all, a global problem.
Kade
In 2010, the Meeting began working with the Kamanga Dance Ensemble (or Kade, pronounced ‘kah-day’). Made up of young people between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five (many of them orphaned by Zambia’s HIV/AIDS epidemic), Kade’s young people use dance and drama to raise awareness about community problems. First, they work with young and old within Kamanga and other Zambian communities to define the problem. They then devise educational sketches that stimulate participation so that, together with their audiences, they come up with practical solutions the community can implement. In the past, Kade worked with Irish Aid to support a new water system and other projects designed to upgrade Kamanga’s housing, roads and marketplace.
I got to know Kade during my research on the history of malaria and HIV/AIDS in Zambia, where ‘Theatre for Development’ is used to spread public health messages. Kade’s work with their community is a sterling example of this method. Their dance-drama sketches have raised awareness throughout Zambia of how to prevent HIV/AIDS and cholera. Kade kids are trained in Zambian traditions of dance and storytelling by their artistic director, Timothy Mgala, formerly of the University of Zambia’s cultural centre. This training helps them gain the confidence to ask challenging questions of their elders. Then they adapt Zambian cultural traditions to spread the message, using evidence from the science of climate change while also respecting their elders’ unique understanding of Zambia’s environment.
Partners
Disley Friends began by funding masks of animal characters used in traditional storytelling, such as Kalulu the Hare and greedy Hyena. These characters and stories are then adapted to illustrate the ways in which the activities of humans cause climate change – for example, in one sketch, Hyena represents our insatiable hunger for consumer goods, cars and air travel, while the poor labour to produce these goods in an overheating greenhouse.
Disley Friends also acted as partners with Kade on a successful funding application to Artists Project Earth, which helped the kids to put a roof on their cultural centre in Kamanga. They use the centre for their educational programmes, as well as for dance performances that provide a small income for the kids – some of whom are struggling to provide their younger siblings with food and school fees. Future projects include a webpage linked to our Meeting’s website, which will assist Kade’s fundraising efforts. We also want to help them to build an environmentally friendly wall for their cultural centre so they can more easily charge a fee for their dance performances.
Lessons in hope
We have much to gain from engaging with the lives and goals of Kade’s kids. Many of them are orphans who have coped with illness, death and poverty. For those of us in Disley Meeting, this means learning simplicity through contact with people who carry on life with the bare minimum. But Kade’s young people are not child famine victims grateful for any kind of help, known to us only through aid organisation posters. They are adolescents and young adults challenging their circumstances, often propelled by anger about the global inequalities that limit their lives and blight their future. Thus, working with them also gives us the opportunity to learn from people who have very different cultural values and traditions. It is a situation in which the Quaker method, with its commitment to dialogue, assists us.
Most important, however, is the renewed energy we gain from young people who believe in the possibility of change. Here, in Britain, reducing the environmental impact of our everyday activities takes commitment, especially when the public seems to have lost the urgency that first surrounded climate change. This has been dissipated by economic worries and uncertainty about the effects of budget cutting. But at Disley we have recaptured that urgency by listening to kids for whom climate change is an immediate reality, not a distant concern. We want to help Kade to bring their message to a wider audience of people in wealthy, industrialised, nations like Britain. We want to raise awareness of the consequences of climate change, which reinforces the unequal distribution of resources and harms most those who have contributed to it the least. Together with these energetic young Zambians, we can make a difference.
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