Latrine Project Begins

So we started the latrine project today in earnest. Yay! They said they were going to start at 8am but I know Africa time so I finished reading The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien and then went over there about nine. To my delighted surprise, they were already there working!

I was expecting disaster. Because, as with making movies, God also does not want your funded project to succeed (right, Rory?). I was expecting none of the villager workers to have shown up. I was expecting…I don’t know. Disaster. But that didn’t happen at all! The village workers were all there (I didn’t know any of them, either) and they had already laid out several sand piles and were mixing the cement into the first one. Within the first few minutes, they made the first brick!!

There were about 20 workers in all. They were all in pretty high spirits. Of course, right when I got there they told me they needed tea, so I sent Drissa to the boutique to get tea and sugar and there was one guy whose job it was to make tea all day. I told him to get them cookies too so they all had a biscuit snack as well. It cost me just under 1 mille franc, which is like $2.

One thing you can say about Malians is they don’t mind a hard day of work! Nobody seemed to be disgruntled that they were there (each of them was ordered to come by their family chief, who was ordered to send somebody by the village chief). They were working out in the hot sun all day in the hottest part of the year doing manual labor with no shade. And yet they were laughing and joking and everybody was working.

I was really happy.

The best part was that around ten, about six of the unskilled workers, after observing the Bagayogo brothers (skilled labor) making the first set of bricks, took the second mold (somebody brought a second mold – from where I have no idea, but it was awesome because they could work a lot faster), went to the next pile, and started making bricks themselves. One of the Brothers Bagayogo helped them some until they got the hang of it, but after awhile, the six of them were making all their own bricks. They were elated and giggling when they started making them right all by themselves. When they would slide one out of the mold perfectly they’d let out a satisfied and kind of surprised laugh. By 11, all the bricks were being made by the villagers with only supervision from the Brothers Bagayogo. You know what we call that in Peace Corps? Capacity Building. And it’s the goal of every single Peace Corps project – DIFFERENCE MADE!

So as noon was rolling around I started to get nervous because the lunch wasn’t there. I was like, here’s the next part where this project can go belly up. What if no lunch comes??? But then a few minutes after noon, one woman walked up with a big bowl of toh on her head and dropped it off with me in the shade. I thanked her and she walked off again, and I started scanning the area for more women with bowls (one bowl would not be enough for 20+ men). None came. I was like shit!! But then Drissa took off on his bike and was gone for awhile. When he finally came back, about one or a little after, he had bundles of bowls with him (to send food traveling, they fill the bowl, put the cover on it, and then tie it up in a piece of cloth so it can be easily carried, even on a bike). I was like thank God! I guess it was Drissa’s family and neighbors who were in charge of food today.

But that’s when I noticed that I was turning as red as a lobster. I mean, granted, I had forgotten to put on sunscreen this morning, but I was sitting in the shade all day! I took care to not be in the sun. But it did not help. I was painfully aware that I had given myself a wicked sunburn. So I showed Drissa the difference between my shin and my calf and he was like yeah…you should go home and get out of the sun. I mean, they have no concept of sunburn. They don’t GET sunburn. They think it’s funny that my skin reacts to stuff that’s normal to them in strange ways (like my mango rash…or heat rash for that matter). So I don’t know if he understood when I was telling him that it was going to hurt later and that it comes from the SUN, not just heat, but at any rate I had to go home. Which was kind of disappointing for me because I would have liked to stay for the whole workday.

At the rate they were working, it seemed like they might even get all the interior bricks done that day. Which would mean heading to the school to start digging the hole tomorrow, since we are waiting on a different mold for the exterior bricks.

So I’ll head out again tomorrow – this time having sunscreened myself – and hopefully we’ll be breaking ground at the school!

As I was sitting there watching them make the bricks, I felt like I used to feel on the set of my films. I worked hard and did all the preproduction and now my crew was putting it into effect, with a sense of urgency, quality and a good attitude. I guess the only difference is that I don’t have anything to do. I just sit and watch. But I guess it’s because my job came before today and will end after the latrines are fully standing and I close the project and do the paperwork.

Like I say, I work with my head, not with my hands. That’s why they’re so soft and pretty ☺.