Peter Jones paces about like a leopard tracking prey. Inside his home on the bluffs overlooking the Zambezi River, his guests sit on makeshift bleachers and throw back fine South African wines, while watching the telecast of a rugby championship between England and Australia. Whenever the satellite feed blurs and crackles, Jones curses and rattles suspect electronics; whenever England scores, he redefines irrational exuberance and his hounds take up his howl. England victorious, during dinner, Jones skewers his Australian chef so mercilessly that it seems advisable to hire a food taster. The zany side of the impresario of the posh River Club in Zambia is local legend. At nearby Simonga Village, the former British commando officer and Falklands veteran is celebrated for his serious side.

Some people throw up their hands when grim news dominates Africa. Some roll up their shirtsleeves. While in the 5th Airborne Brigade in the early '80s, Jones was schooled not just in rough-and-tumble special operations skills but in the importance the British have learned of winning the local "hearts and minds."

"Here in Africa, we are always keen to see that the people see direct benefits to themselves as a result of our decision to invest in the continent," he says.

The River Club seems an odd focal point for community development of an impoverished village. Hotel guests, decompressing from long flights or the pleasing rigors of safaris, share gourmet dinners and lively conversation on the verandah with Jones and, after they say uncle to passing-of-the-port rituals, retreat to ritzy bungalows that open over a bend in the river hippos frequent as it flows toward nearby Victoria Falls. The scene is worlds apart from the 3,000 inhabitants of nearby Simonga Village, where children play amid humble huts, nervous chickens, and parched plantings of millet, mealy and beans their families consume or barter.

But Jones treats his small empire as a command center in tackling the challenge of improving the quality of life at Simonga, mindful of entreaties from the Environmental Impact Assessor to "Please make sure that you are able to keep it going. The people have sadly become used to others letting them down." After four years of operations, Jones determined that his company was on a good enough footing to take on the responsibility.

He had already been sending his guests 30 km to Mukuni Village to experience life in a working rural community. The chief there, a former MD (CEO) of BP Zambia, was skilled at preparing his village for tourism. A new Sun International Hotel near Mukuni, and its influx of tourists freed Jones to direct his personal attentions closer to home, to Simonga.

The villagers are mostly of the royal tribe of Zambia, the Lozi, whose king, the Litunga, once ruled over the whole of what is now the Western Province. A quarter of River Club staff is Simonga villagers Jones has trained.

Breathtakingly beautiful Victoria Falls.

"The first objective," he says, "was to create incentives for receiving visitors - a compensation formula based on the number of guests touring the village. We already pay a unit per guest for the removal of litter and other debris from the tour path. We're now asking the villagers to devise a rubbish collection system for the entire village, offering to haul away debris in our vehicle."

Compensation will increase with the completion of a palace for the chief to stay when meeting with his local subjects, and when the village trains its own guides to conduct tours.

"Assessing critical village needs," Jones explains, "we quickly realized the need to focus efforts on the children. Education is the most important feature of any society, for it ensures growth. The school project has gone well, and we have raised enough money to put all the kids through school for at least one year. We have been able to buy books and pencils for all the children. Recently, an American guest sent a load of educational books."

Jones is exploring small solar technologies that would provide light for extra teaching and homework time, and he is laying plans to add classrooms.

One guest, who wishes anonymity, agreed to sponsor the top child in the school for four years of education at the town's best boarding school, a commitment of US$8,000. An American who lives in Switzerland, he also donated three football strips and 10 footballs for the sports teams through his Lions group in Germany.

"Six foot seven inches tall, he sends his hand-me-down clothes to the tallest man, who had been out of luck finding a suitable wardrobe in town!" Jones laughs.

He hopes to leverage all these efforts with similar considerations, large and small, from interested guests who recognize the village's difficulties. One example he cites is "the Street family, from New York. They brought their son, Evan, and their three daughters. We organized a football match at the school for them to take part in. Afterwards, Evan handed over a donation of US$500 he had raised as part of his Bar Mitzvah celebration. It was a terrific time, and a wonderful example for the village youngsters."

A major challenge is the water supply, for which women have had to spend most of the day walking to the river and schlepping large jugs back, returning exhausted and short on time for family. Hippos are feared by fishermen, but the Zambezi crocodiles are notorious for dining out on people who linger at the river's edge. Crocs take one or more Simonga villagers a year.

Local school children.

"We have dug three wells with another three in progress," Jones says, "aiming for everyone to have good, clean water within 500 meters of their homes within a year." "Hand pumps are being procured from a donor group, and we hope to resurrect the old borehole pump and irrigation system."

This is a critical step in allowing the village to grow more crops during an unusually long drought, building what observers call "the perfect famine" striking the region.

Other factors mugging Zambia, the government of which logged significant social and economic progress during prosperous times, are an economic power-dive, including fractured copper prices; difficult adjustments to the competition that accompanies globalization and the dumping of cheap goods that have devastated Zambia's textile industry; the demagogic destruction of agriculture infrastructure in the region's former breadbasket, neighboring Zimbabwe, by its fallen angel dictator, Robert Mugabe.

And then there is HIV. AIDS experts now predict that, absent significant developments, the disease may eventually claim half the adult population. In a country of 10.3 million people, two million AIDS orphans are expected by the decade's end. Already, 650,000 children have lost one or both parents.

The traditional Zambian village reverence for raising children, which awarded special status and care to orphans, is being overwhelmed as grandparents wear out. The specter haunts Jones as he encourages a group of Swedish doctors, one a former guest, to explore setting up satellite clinics in nearby villages that share a visiting doctor who will resupply local nurses.

"Even the simple addition of toilets and related sanitation programs, with health education, would improve everyone's life tremendously," says Jones. "Environmental maintenance is quite a challenge, and the women are quicker to understand its importance."

Along the gauntlets Jones must run are petty bureaucrats "who see investors as money wells from which large amounts of cash can be extracted," and he hopes projects, such as establishing a clinic, won't encounter bureaucratic minefields. "The local city council recently tried to raise our property tax rates from the equivalent of US$120 to US$7,000," he says. "They compromised at just over US$1,000.

The River Club.

"Services would be nice," Jones muses. "We don't mind helping the main town back to its feet, but there's a limit, especially as we have to grade our own roads, process our own water, treat our sewage, and drive all refuse and garbage to the municipal dump, which exacts more fees for a license."

Equally irksome are persistent recommendations that the River Club paint everything green; the ivory color is not natural - "don't tell the elephants," says Jones - and that manicured lawns should be dug up in favor of natural bush, as if patrons are on safari walking from their bungalows to the colonial-styled main building. The swank digs were the former home of "a delightful elderly Belgian lady" who wanted to start a lodge operation but didn't have proper financing, and were Jones's home for two years after he bought the place in 1995.

Jones often dares guests to take on the legendary Class V rapids of the Zambezi - too rapid for hippos and crocs, fortunately, as the rafts are frequently flipped - a fire-hose river run Jones can do in his sleep, as he used to train guides for it. He mischievously nudges the more foolhardy toward a new terror, run by a lawyer from South Africa: the Zambezi Swing - 53 meters of unfettered free fall off a cliff before a line across the chasm rockets participants into a huge pendulum swing across a deep gorge open to the Zambezi. But Jones's devotes his gentler persuasions and charm to prompt willing guests to brainstorm innovations for a village that can sorely use them.

"For some efforts, the village has been slow on the uptake but now they see that we have done what we said we would," says Jones. "Now we will promise to do something if they do something first. That incentive always holds promise, the belief that they can help themselves."

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