Project: Mwazisi Beekeepers Workshop

This past week we held our first serious Mwazisi beekeepers association training. The idea for the training came to me when a friend of mine from USAid gave me a set of instructional beekeeping videos in Chichewa. The videos were produced by an NGO called Compass 2 that were trying to provide Malawian beekeepers with technical training to build the business country wide. It’s over six hours of videos explaining how to build a top bar hive, the equipment needed, transferring from traditional hives, colony management and division, harvesting, processing, and business.

Bwana Mgogoninga left, Nya Soko middle, Bendicto Gondwe right

My dilemma was that my beekeepers come from all over the mwazisi valley an area spanning over 20km. I can barely get people to come together for an association meeting once every few months, so getting everybody together to watch several hours of video would be a challenge. I decided to turn it into an all inclusive three day workshop, where the videos would be mixed with practical sessions where we would go out and do some of the things we were learning in the videos. I also asked Mwazisi's best beekeeper Village Headman Magogoninga to add some theoretical sessions to supplement the videos information.

I had two planning meetings with a handful of association members beforehand to get everything organized. We decided to make it as low budget as possible. All of the participants would carry a plate of maize flower and 150 mk to cover lunch. We figured this would weed out the people who weren't really serious about beekeeping, but were expecting the handouts and allowances that usually come with NGO trainings (a very crippling method of development in my opinion). We set the dates for August the 3rd through the 5th, the week after a major football tournament that has a prize of MK50,0000 for the first place team. This would surely dominate the attention of the entire community, so I didn't want it to conflict with our training.

I hung posters advertising, and over fifty people had registered by the week before the training was supposed to start. Unfortunately that weekend there were two funerals near Mwazisi. A funeral brings everything to a halt. Even if people aren't close to the deceased, and don't go to the funeral they close up their business, or stop any public activities out of respect. This is why the football tournament was stopped in the quarterfinals and postponed to Monday, the first day of my training. At one of the funerals I asked some of the beekeepers if they thought I should postpone the training. They said "No, if people want to watch football, then let them go, people who are serious will come." So we left everything as planned; 8am-4pm Monday through Wensday.

Come 8:00am Monday morning I find myself sitting outside a locked classroom by myself. Fuming mad I head over to the teacher's house who promised to unlock the classroom powered with solar panels before 7am. When I get there he tells me that another teacher brought the TV screen home to watch on his car battery, and he's gone to Rumphi and locked the house so we can't get it. I rush back home to get my laptop. On the road I see one of the members and ask "mulutenge?" (are you going?) He looks at my watch and smiles "8 yakwhana yayi" (8 isn't o.k.). I hang my head and mutter some curse words.

Toking notes on mogogninga's lecture

By the time I get back a few of the participants are waiting with Mgogoninga. I let them in and try to set up the laptop to occupy them with the introduction video while we wait for others to come. I run up to Benidicto's house, who's also supposed to teach a few sessions. By the time I get back I find there are about 15 participants, and Mgogoninga has started teaching. When I ask why they stopped the video, they say there is no power…I'm baffled, I made sure nobody used the battery over the weekend, so that the batteries would have a chance to get a full charge. It takes me about twenty minutes of trying different converters, and fiddling with the invertor before I figure out that students plugging in their cell phone chargers in the next door classroom has shorted out the system. So finally I am able to start the video on hive construction.

Bwana Mzito teaches participants  on how to build a  top bar,

I run over to give the women we hired to cook lunch the pots, and food. I spend the next half hour running errands for them…"get more salt…cooking oil…onions…firewood." When I get back I find the video has finished and Bwana Mizito, the carpenter we assigned the task of teaching how to build the hives practically is taking everybody out to the workbench. He teaches efficiently and effectively, by lunchtime we have a completed hive, and has even let the participants try their hand at making top bars with his plain.

Magogoninga teaches theory most of the afternoon, and is absolutely the star of the show. He's a teacher by profession, and teaches from organized lesson plans. He shares his knowledge on everything from choosing selecting an apiary, to bee behavior. I was amazed, watching the whole class fully engaged, and diligently scribbling notes in their notebooks, and asking questions. I begin to regret my early morning cursing.

Each successive class  goes more smoothly as we fall into a pattern, people show up closer to 8:00am and we follow each video with a practical session to keep it from getting to cumbersome. Mzito finishes the first hive, and teaches everybody how to make top bars from palm fronds to save money on planks. Benidicto also teaches sessions on how to make beekeeping cheaper, by showing the group a beesuit made from maize sacks that my friend Greg Dorr gave him two years ago. He also shows the group a cheep model of a hive made from bamboo and sealed with mud plaster another friend Elihu Isele taught me to make last year. He then has the entire group take part in a session where we build a lighter version of the same design using waste paper and cassava flour paper-mache.

Sadly yet another funeral in Mgogoninga's home area meant he couldn't come to the last day, but we still have a jam packed day anyways. Mrs. Kataya the wildlife extension officer for Vwaza comes with two visitors a Malawian PhD student studying Environmental Studies at the University of Budapest, with his Canadian professor who is conducting surveys with communities living around game reserves about their interaction with the wildlife. They sit in on a session that I teach about business, budgeting and grant writing in Chitumbuka. Afterwards the Proffesor said "that looked mentally exhausting." Hell yeah it was! Most of these concepts are pretty new, and wouldn't have a direct translation, even if I have mastered this language, which I certainly haven't. Mentally exhausting seems like a pretty good description of every day for me.

In the afternoon we baited one of Mzito's hives, and took a little field trip to hang it on a nearby mountain. Our last lesson is a disscussion about the way forward in Mwazisi. We decide that it's best for everybody to remain in their family groups or small local clubs of 10 or so people, and work on getting up to ten occupied hives per person. The Beekeeper's association is more of an informal gathering where we can share information, and bulk all of our honey so that processors can buy it larger quantities. We manage to finish the last video around 5:00pm.

I was walking on air afterwards. It was the most successful gathering I have organized as a Peace Corps volunteer, and it didn't take any outside money. I'm sure I taught less then a quarter of the sessions. Bwana Mgogoninga, Benidicto, and Bwanna Mzito all turned out to be spectacular teachers, and never even thought of asking for anything in return for all of their time and effort. It's people like them that made my decision to extend for a third year an easy one. I think the football tournament was a blessing in disguise. Because it weeded my large pool of participants down to just the most serious and interested individuals. We had 25 to 30 people each day coming from a variety of areas. I know I can work with any of these individuals and expect the same seriousness and genuine effort, and that makes me pretty damn hopeful for my next few months here.