It's part of a better, more environmentally friendly way to eke out a rural existence in a harsh landscape. It's a paradoxical meeting between an agrarian culture less advanced in many ways than that of our own pioneer forebears, and cutting-edge technologies shared by a world community committed to alleviating poverty in ways that can continue into an indefinite future. While at the centre, each trainee couple and their children occupy a simple brick hut consisting of two small bedrooms, a sitting room and kitchen. At the start of the program, the couples receive loans for livestock and other capital items they'll need to complete their training and establish themselves when they return to their villages. The crops grown and the animals raised during their stay at Kasisi provide not only subsistence for the trainees themselves but also enough marketable surplus so that the initial loan can usually be paid off by the time they graduate.
Instruction is quite informal.
Success is measured by the level of internal cooperation existing among the families as well as by each couple's level of production. A newer program, just introduced within the last couple of years, trains village blacksmiths. Entering the three-month course with no prior experience in metalwork and varying low levels of education, the students leave with a complete set of forge tools they have made themselves, and the skills to create and repair a wide variety of agricultural tools and machine parts. Establishing a new shop back in his own native village, a blacksmith graduate represents not only another entrepreneur able to provide for his family, but also an enhancement to the efficiency and productivity of an entire community, as exemplified by one of Paul Desmarais's favourite anecdotes. It concerns a farmer who needed a U-bolt for his plough and made a long and arduous journey into Lusaka in search of it, ultimately without success.