Do you want to play?

I followed the directions that the neighbor boys gave me and soon found myself approaching the basketball court. A few people were warming up, and even from a distance I could see that they seemed to be dunking the ball with ease. As the saw that the white man was coming towards the court -- and even dressed conspicuously like he wanted to play -- a couple of them sounded their salutations. Once I was courtside it was all introductions and high fives and questions about everything. But one question stood out among the rest: Do you want to play?

To make a long story short, I became good friends with these ball-players, who turned out to be the basketball team of the Zambian military. During my next several weeks in Lusaka, I spent a lot of time with them on the court, off the court, in buses, at markets, on dance floors, visiting Victoria Falls (the picture here is of us swimming just upstream), and even on the farm and in church. My best friend on the team was a fellow named Fadiga. He was a showboat who always wore sunglasses and liked to remind me about his remarkable resemblance to the actor Wesley Snipes (for those of you familiar with the classic basketball film White Men Can't Jump, I did my best to play Woody Harrelson alongside Wesley).

What does all this have to do with faith and the farm? That's what I was asking myself, and even starting to feel a wee-bit guilty enjoying all this free time to play ball when I hadn't made it out of the city yet. (This was mostly because it just took a lot of time to make contacts in rural Zambia, but more on that in the next entry). Little did I expect that being a basketball player would lead me to things of direct interest to my project, but it just so happened that Fadiga's father, Mr. Manzila, was a retired pastor living in the city who recently started a farm a short drive outside the city. So we arranged a day when I could meet his father and visit the farm (we actually had to cancel the first day that we planned and reschedule another because there were police blockades and demonstrations concerning the recent presidential elections blocking traffic out of the city.)

When I finally did make it out to the farm, I learned quite a bit from this aging but spry farmer. Allow me to share a few of the thoughts he shared with me:

When I look at all of nature, I see God.

You know, water is almost the source of all life. (Spoken while standing watching water come out of the pump, gesturing at the trees).

When we see nature, we see God beyond nature. We see his works.

I have not left the village. My spirit is still there.

In the village we live side-by-side with nature. You sit under a tree and it is peaceful. I need to go back there every year or so to go to where you can't hear any cars.

There are a few elders in the village who go to the big tree to call to their Gods when it doesn't rain. But we Christians know that rain comes from above, and if we pray to God it will rain when it pleases him.

I left the village because the river has mostly dried up. It was filled in by soil, by wind erosion. It is now flat across where there was a gully with a river in it. I wouldn't have said it was possible, but it has happened. That river was our source of life. It gave us fish and water.

I think this change is natural. But some say it is because they built a dam 1100 kilometers away on a different tributary of the Zambezi. This is for the ecologists and environmentalists to discover.

I use as much chicken manure as I can for my maize. I don't know enough to say why, but the synthetic fertilizers don't work as well. Chicken manure will nourish the seed from germination to harvest, but we've had to add synthetic fertilizer several times.

I won't see the fruit on these. These are for my children. (Spoken while walking by waist-high mango trees).

The African way of farming is to clear all the bush from the land that you are going to farm. On my plot I have left the trees in the middle of the land, and I grow my maize and vegetables in the cleared area around the bush. I've been trying growing different things here in the trees. First I tried growing tomatoes among the trees but that didn't work, so then I tried keeping turkeys there, but they were getting stolen. Now I have planted these grapes and [another vine fruit that I did not know]. We'll see how this works.

We did most of this talking as he was leading me around the farm, showing me what he was growing. He had lemon, orange, mango, and other fruit trees. He had sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, cassava, maize, carrots, rape (kale), spinach, onions, squash, and other crops as well.

He gave me a ride in his truck back into town, and he gave me a bag of carrots and cassava (also known in English as manioc), and this turned out to be quite a tasty gift. During the drive home one of the things we spoke about was that he would like to learn more about farming practices he could do, but that the government directed most of the agricultural training efforts towards big commercial farms. This was my first real introduction into the role that the government has had in shaping the lives of small-scale farmers in Zambia, but I was to hear much more about it over the course of the rest of my time there. So I will write more on that next time. Later on I was also able to spend some time in a remote village, and so Mr. Manzila's words about the difference between city life and village life took on a richer meaning for me. But, again, I will write more about that when we get there.

Just a quick note on the present time: I have recently arrived in India. Sadly, I had to change my original plans to stay in Sri Lanka because of the violence there. However, India is already proving to be a very rich place for me to learn about faith and the farm.