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WHY WE'RE DIFFERENT!
1. One hundred percent of your donation goes to the people of Zambia! Everyone who works on this fund is a volunteer.
2. We help where the need is the greatest No one in America can be classified as Extremely poor! You will be helping the worlds poorest people  
3.Education is a cure, not a band aid

The Fight for Survival

Poverty

The End of Poverty, a book written in 2005 by Dr. Jeffery D. Sachs, reminds us that there are degrees of poverty. Extreme poverty means that households cannot meet the basic needs to sustain life. A lack of food, drinking water, and medical care are all factors of extreme poverty. Although we have poor here in America, none live in extreme poverty. Zambia is one of only a handful of countries where extreme poverty is actually on the rise. 

Many people simply dismiss this extreme poverty as a result of corruption in the governments of these countries. The facts paint a different picture. Although working Zambians pay a whopping 40 percent in taxes, only five percent of Zambians have paying jobs. Taxes from five percent of the people obviously cannot help the other 95 percent.

Most Zambians are subsistence farmers and yields per acre are extremely low for the amount of work they do. They have to depend on the rain for irrigation and crude tools to plant whatever seeds they were able to resist eating during the hungry (dry) season.

Starvation

In Zambia, 2.5 million people were on the verge of starvation in 2002. Still today, most Zambian children face hunger daily and many suffer from extreme malnutrition--a preventable situation.  In southern Africa, the main killer of children under the age of five is malaria–-a preventable disease. While life expectancy in the world is increasing, life expectancy in Zambia is 36 years old and declining.

Disease

AIDS
Early on in the epidemic of AIDS, there was no education about the disease, and it spread rapidly.  Doctors don’t have rubber gloves and almost all eventually get HIV and spread it to patients without knowing.  AIDS is so prevalent in Zambia that not even those who choose abstinence for life are sure to be safe.  Many young people are scared to get married because the risk is so high. The only thing that can stop it is better education and convincing the young people to have only one partner for life.

Malaria and other diseases
Mosquitoes that carry malaria are common in Zambia, and people (living outside much of the time) are exposed to mosquitoes. They don’t have repellents or even a $15.00 mosquito net, which could save their life. It is a luxury unobtainable to most. This disease can be fatal or can last for several weeks.  People are often extremely sick with malaria. Not only does this create a high level of discomfort, but it makes it difficult to keep a job or maintain a farm.
Most Zambian families have had one or more children die. Many have had one or both parents die causing a very severe problem of orphaned children. In the rural villages, simply getting an ear infection can be as deadly as cancer in America.  There are generally no medicines, not even a simple pain reliever like aspirin.
So what can education do?
 

          In 2004 I took a ride with Mr. Kapembwa then principal of the Kasama Teachers College. We were heading to Lake Tanganyika the point at which this tarmac road would become a dirt road and then we would be entering the Belgium Congo. Along the way Mr. Kapembwa pointed out all the various projects that had been started and then failed.

            “Oh, and over there is a Pineapple farm started from some big wig in Japan. He lost all his Pineapple trees as soon as he went back to Japan, something about water damage, I don’t know. And that, that is a power plant or should I say was a power plant, it kind of went to pot when the owner went back to Australia.”

            Broken down trackers, dusty well pumps, dried up irrigation ditches, barren slash and burn fields, half built apartment buildings covered with thirty years of grim. It’s as if a thriving metropolis came to an abrupt halt round about 1974. Why couldn’t things keep going the way they were when the British were here? 

            On that same trip I stopped at Chabala village to see if the hand corn grinder I left when I visited in 2001 was still working. Of course it was not. Any time anything went wrong there was no looking into the instruction manual to see what had gone wrong. And of course there was no one educated enough to figure out such a small complicated mechanical instrument as a hand corn grinder or a water pump. What had gone wrong? I don’t know? It simply stopped working and like everything else that stopped working it was thrown down to be walked by and added to the enormous clutter that littered all foot paths and road sides.

             Could it be we got the cart before the horse?

            What good are good ideas and complicated machines in a country where its people are dormant? Frozen in time because of the burden of illiteracy, never taught to read because reading was for the wealthy or for foreigners and now their children do not have jobs.

            Why Education?  Why education?

             Have you ever bought anything with the words printed on; Made in Zambia?

            How can a factory function without employees that can take over and run it when the boss is away?  

            Even the latest and greatest of all plans; that of micro loaning, cant be given to people who cant write their names, who cant keep a log of how many chickens they have and how many eggs and how much feed and how much money and how much to keep and how much to pay back. Even with a basic high school education, people begin to expound with eyes of progress.

            “Peggy you have to stop thinking of education in terms as jobs, people make better mothers and better fathers having been educated.”

            Mr. Kapembwa was right, first comes the education, then comes the jobs. But one thing is for sure with out an education neither one will happen and time will continue to stand still. 

            The only thing that makes a devolving country different from an un-developing country is the amount of education one country has over another.

Sincerely, Peggy Rogers
 
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