Project Number One

So I have gotten the ball rolling for my first project. It is not an AgFo project, but rather a health project, but I believe it is important for the people of my village to have access to clean water.

The pump that had been working since I got here broke a few weeks ago, leaving my village center, a Sous Prefecture, without access to clean, drinkable water. This doesn’t mean TOO much to me personally, because I have a fancy filter and bleach and I could drink well water if I had to using those but people here don’t have filters and most of them don’t know that bleaching their water will help (or using Sur-Eau – which is basically bleach – a product donated by Unicef and PSI and says right on the bottle “NOT FOR SALE. GIVEN FREELY.” [in French] but is inevitably boofed and sold at 3 mille a bottle or about 60 cents, which can still be too much for a family here trying make ends meet and living on a dollar a day, as many do in Africa).

Anyway, in total there are three broken pumps in my village and one new one being built at the mosque, but as my friend Amadou said, once it’s finished it will be broken very soon since it will be the only working pump. And who knows when it will be finished as it is. The closest working pump is in a smaller village that is “far” (I have heard 2.5 – 5 kilometers, which is too far for the average family to go, carrying it on their head). And, like the future mosque pump, will be broken soon due to all the demand.

Anyway, the other three pumps are not completely broken, they are reparable but what my Sous Prefet said is that the NGOs that built those pumps did what lots of NGOs do and said here’s your pump, if it breaks it’s up to the community to fix it, but then did not train anyone in the community how to fix it nor suggest a system of collecting money from pump-users to use to repair it (non-sustainable development YAHOO!), so when it breaks, it stays broken. And this is after putting in a $10-20 THOUSAND dollar investment PER PUMP. Ooh it makes me so mad!

Anyway then he told me that the community says it should be the government who pays to repair the pumps, even though they don’t BELONG to the government, they belong to the community, so no one pays for repairs and as I said before, pumps stay broken, people drink water from the river and are confused as to why they are always sick and grandma dies.

Which brings me to my project. Peace Corps has a funded project program called Peace Corps Partnership Program which, once I have written a proposal and budget and had it approved by my APCD (WOOO ABDOUL!), I can put on the internet and tell all my family and friends to go make a tax-deductible donation. And groups like Friends of Guinea (made up of Guinea RPCVs and friends/family) and any stranger, really, who has a few bucks to send to help people have drinkable water in Africa. Once I have gotten all the money pledged, the project closes and eventually the money shows up in my in-country bank account. I then use it to fix pumps.

Here’s the catch. In order to do a funded project, the community has to give 25% of the cost either in cash or in-kind donations like material and labor. So this is what I told my Sous Prefet. I said, if this is something the community wants, we can fix all three pumps, they just have to come up with 25% of the budget. He said he would bring it up to the President of the CRD and seemed excited about the prospect. Apparently the dude who would do the fixing lives in the bigger city to the South so he would have to come up and do the estimate. And I will bring up the idea of training someone IN MY VILLAGE to do simple repairs. And maybe sensibilizing the community about how NOT to break the pump. Or have someone who does all the pumping all day, paid for by a small fee per bidon (this is the system in a lot of places), who knows how not to break the pump. Hey look I just created jobs! (now I’m a Small Enterprise Development volunteer TOO!)

So anyway. If the community really wants this, they will get the guy up here to do the estimate and show me how they can give 25% of the cost. And then I will write the proposal. And maybe we will once again have clean water. Inshallah.

I call this my first project unless you want to count my other, unintended project: when I was first getting my yard ready for planting, the petites would help me collect all the trash out of it and they got it in their head somehow that I wanted old rusty nails and pieces of metal wherever they could find it. So inevitably kids come by my house about 10 times a day with handfuls of this stuff expecting bon-bons (candy or gum). Sometimes I give it to them, other times I don’t. I don’t really want all these rusty metal pieces but came to think of it as such: it’s better than them all sitting in the ground waiting for a barefooted kid (as they all are more often than not) to step on it and end up with tetanus. So there you go. Health project #2.

Plus my hand washing sensibilizations. I put a poster on my door that I got from Unicef that espouses the joys of washing your hands with soap, especially in the following circumstances: before cooking, before eating, before breastfeeding, after using the latrine and after cleaning your baby’s butt cause they pooped everywhere (“nettoyage anal du l’enfant”). Everyone that comes to my house reads the poster (complete with pictures, more effective) over and over again and I make people wash their hands with soap after working in the garden (another important time to wash with soap as there is animal feces all over the place). Health Project #3.

Other health-related activities: sensibilizing my friends that malaria comes ONLY from mosquitoes (you can’t get it from eating raw mangoes or getting wet from the rain), AIDS facts (can only get it from contact with blood or sex – can’t get it from mosquitoes or shaking hands or hugging. But then Crazy asked me if you can get it from using the same razor to shave your head. And I was like ooh…good question. Because if the razor nicks the person with AIDS and gets blood on it, yeah, so I wouldn’t take the risk of using the same razor [they use straight razor blades] but didn’t want to scare him either – hey another reason not to leave your used razor blades on the ground [as if little kids putting them in their mouths wasn’t enough]), the wonderfulness of condom use (“You know what’s cheap? Prudence [the local brand of condoms, sold for NO MORE than mille franc for three or about 20 cents, Crazy said he thought they were cent franc each which is, like, 2 cents]. You know what’s expensive? AIDS.”)

As far as AgFo projects? I got my counterpart really intersted in promoting Moringa, showed about 7 people how to fill Coyah (water) sachets for a pepiniere and how to find good soil to put in them (under a tree. Leaf litter = good, dark soil), did organic fertilizer (Gliricidia leaves) with about 7 people (who all thought I was crazy…”you’re going to rip up leaves and mix them into your soil? WHY? You could just use chemical fertilizer!”), and occasionally work with a groupement doing a big pepiniere for reforestation (but they pretty much know what they’re doing and don’t really need my help, thanks to the last volunteer!). What I really hope to get done at the end of my two years is plant a bunch of Moringa in public places (and in peoples’ yards) and show people how to use it and why it is important. If that’s all I get done, I’ll be happy. I am afraid I have already ruined my credibility, though, because due to extenuating circumstances I did not get my garden up and running early enough and now have the most pathetic garden in town. Plus I planted a bunch of sort of “experimental” stuff, some of which is not working out. So it looks like I don’t know what I’m doing. Seriously.

Every time I feel kind of useless and like I’m not doing anything/nothing is happening, I should refer back to this entry.