On Sustainable International Development

A.k.a. Sometimes, I work. (1/17)

So I spend a good amount of time reading and doing sudokus, but I am actually trying to do something here, so I thought I'd tell you about it.

The idea behind the Peace Corps is that we will not always be here to help people, so any help we give should be sustainable 0 we can leave knowing that the work we started will be continued. A major part of this is the promotion and facilitation of change rather than being the one changing, especially the facilitation of behavior change. As Peace Corps volunteers, we live like and with the locals, learn their language(s), and spend a long period of time with them. We build relationships, develop a rapport and a reputation, and form an in-depth understanding of our specific communities. In this way, we can understand what the village needs and have people listen to us as one of their won rather than some random foreigner coming in to preach at them and throw money at them.

In Peace Corps Mali, the sectors are Health Education, Water Sanitation, Environment, Education, and Small Enterprise Development - each volunteer has a sector and a job title. What that entails is pretty much at the volunteer's discretion. There are, of course, guidelines, general goals and focuses as a volunteer in Mali, but what I put in to the next two years, as well as what the village and myself get out if it, is up to me. From my understanding, each volunteer is expected to do what they can. No two villages in one country have the exact same needs, let alone two villages on different sides of the earth. Two of the three Peace Corps goals are focused on a cultural exchange. Plus, you might get to site expecting to weigh babies only to realize teh school is in desperate need of a latrine, or the local women's group could really use training on gardening techniques, or, or, or. A Peace Corps volunteer's role is to work with her/his community with what they need - the volunteer's sector and sector projects are guidelines, not rules. And you can always connect anything back to your sector somehow.

So let's talk about me. I am a Health Education Extension Agent, which looks very pretty on all official, important documents. My first three months at site (September - November) were for integration, language acquisition, and observation/ information gathering. After that was two weeks of training, then the holidays (and I admittedly did very little at site during that period), and now here we are. I still spend a lot of time doing very little and am hoping to tackle War & Peace sometime this year, but there are a few things that I am working and/or planning on. In my mind, I separate my work into basic small, medium, and big sections. The small stuff is work I can just do, medium requires other people's cooperation but little if any money, and big is, well, big projects.

Starting with the small... I've set up and started giving animations on basic health topics (NOTE: an animation is like a small presentation and/or demonstration that can benefit those listening. The translation for the Bambara word, baronike, is literally 'little chat). We have vaccinationa nd baby weighings every Wednesday and pre-natal consultations every friday at the maternity, so I am presenting one topic a month at all of those as well as once a month at the local elementary school and once a month in two near-by villages where we do vaccinations. The topics are simple enough: food gropus and eating a balanced diet, germs and hand washing, diarreah and oral rehydration salt, malaria prevention... I've made a schedule of these for the next 9 months, after which I'll start back at the beginning. A Peace Corps manual of mine has a ton of useful animation examples (and translations!), so this was easy for me to get started. The animations focus on small behavior changes - eating veggies that haven't had all of their nutriets cooked or sun-bleached out of them, drinking treated or at least safer water, sleeping under mosquito nets, hand washing. People do not jump to change after I have explained why they need to once, so I'm planning on teaching them to relais (NOTE: relais are local volunteers who help with health campaigns and bring health information to the community. Outreach, basically) to then continue the messages after I've left. I considered teh lesson on food gropus at the shcool this past week productive when the director, who was helping repeat and explain my message, nodded and said, "yes, this is interesting, very interesting," as the groups of kids rotated.

Other small activities I want to start include starting monthly growth monitoring at a nearby maternity, painting murals at the school and the maternities (easy way to broadcast a message, cheap, and fun for everyone!), and getting the nutritional supplement, Plumpie Nut, back to my maternity where it should be since it's free for us to provide to malnourished children. On a tangent, I am lucky enough to live in a village where child malnutrition is not an immediately apparent problem. The local health staff decided that since our rates of kwashirokor and marasmus are low, we don't need Plumpie. I've come to realize that we do still get some cases of severe malnoutrition and a number of cases of moderate malnutrition and am now really pushing them to carry it again. Anyways. I am also having my own solar dryer built and considering trying to get my local women's group to build one after mine does exceptionally well (which it, of course, will). These projects are all fantastic for me because they're easy to get started, somewhere between cheap and free, and - most importantly - can have a considerable impact on people. If everyone washed their hands with soap regularly... oh man, I'd be in heaven.

On the next level, I'd like to help implement more regular meetings of my ASACO and get them to write out a plan d'action for 2011 (NOTE: an ASACO is like the board of directors at the local health level and kind of manage the CSCOM, a.k.a. the clinic). I also want to promote the involvement of the relais in more activities. I've talked with the ASACO about the plan d'action as well as about fixing up the maternity courtyard. The courtyard turns into wet and mucky malaria-carrying mosquito breeding grounds during the rainy season. I want them to cut down the trees, get rid of the bug-infested plants, create a raised path to the maternity door, and slope the ground of the courtyard so the standing water has somewhere to go. I am cautiously hopeful that things are slowly moving forward for this, but we'll see. I also want to change the waste management practices of the students at the local technical school - right now there's a big burnt trash pile on the side of the road - and one holding used needles and meds right behind my CSCOM.

Now onto the big guns. Inevitably, there are projects that require funding. As Peace Corps volunteers, we are expected to think about these projects critically. For example, let's say your village wants you to build them a school. Legitimate, yes? But once you do, how will supplies be bought each year? Who will teach there and who will the director be? How will they be trained, and then how will they be paid? How do the local government personel feel about all of this? Or let's say your women's group wants a well in their garden. Will they maintain it and fix it in the future? And do they actually need it or just want one because they know of another women's group that has a well? In effect, how is the project sustainable?

All funding for Peace Corps funding requires a community contribution - skilled labor, materials, or straight cash - which helps ensure that the community is truly interested and invested in the project. A necessary but somewhat tedious conversation many of us have with villagers is along the lines of "no, I'm not here to just give you money and things. Why do you need X? Can't you use Y? How will the community contribute? What will you do if X breaks in the future? No, I will not just fix it." Having said all of that, I'm considering putting a well in at my maternity and eventually putting in soak-pits all over my village (NOTE: soak-pits are catchment pits for drainage water. In my case, drainage water from latrines that is currently out in the open, breeding disease).

So. I'm tired just from writing that. But I've got a year and 1/2 to make it happen, insh'alla it all actually will.


Childhood (1/12)

This afternoon, I was visiting with some friends when I noticed the two little boys in front of me were playing with one of those old Disney story books - the ones that I played with when I was a child. The book had seen better days; it was missing a cover, as well as a few pages, all of the pages there were ripped, and there had obviously been an unfortunate run-in with some termites. Still, there was Peter Pan fighting Captain Hook in front of my face. I wondered at how the book had found its way to my Malian village - possibly in a care package for one of the previous volunteers, or maybe it was tucked into the third-hand clothing boxes that get shipped all over this continent.

Earlier in the day, I was coloring pictures of food for an animation I will be doing later this week. My 11 year old host sister and her friend sat almost on top of my, glittery eyes watching my colored pencils. "When she goes back to America, maybe she'll give those to me," my host sister half whispered to her friend.

As will happen, I've spent the evening considering and comparing Mali and Ameriki, tonight's ideas centering on childhood. The privileges of being an American are often lofty and broad - we have 'opportunities' - but those privileges extend throughout the most minute details of our entire lives. As a child, I had to get a new box of crayons (with specific colors) every year for school. The worn down, broken crayons were no use to me anyways - why would I want to use those? Few children in F., if any, have ever seen crayons and will never own a box of 64 pointy, shiny new crayola crayons. That Peter Pan book is part of a Disney culture - there were (and are) movies, TV shows, books, dolls, toys, costumes, etc. As an American child, I had a part in that culture, owned various paraphernalia, and wanted even more if it. The kids here don't go to movies, don't have TVs to watch, and don't own more than a few outfits, let alone all of that... stuff. The boys here play marbles with 3 marbles total; the girls play a strange game of trying to rearrange shoes while someone else throws a homemade ball of plastic bags at you. This past fall, I helped my little brother attach a string to a box for him to drag around.

Most of the time, I am not turning idle watching into searches for a deeper meaning. Most of the time, there is not a Peter Pan book around to spark a mental ven-diagram on childhood as I watch kids play; I'm just enjoying their fun and their laughter. It's easy for me to not think about how much they're wanting in those moments. But they are, constantly, and in vast forms - from an 11 year old girl waiting a year and 1/2 in hopes of a mini box of colored pencils to a small child staring hungrily as I buy food from his mother. There are times when I think, "I should ask someone to send X toy for the kids," but then lose myself debating if I should instead be looking to get them something more meaningful. Instead of the little scrap metal car I saw in the Koutiala market, should I be saving up to send my itty bitty host brother, Ardnet, to school for a year? But then, if I did that, he'd stop going when I left, so maybe I ought to just buy him that car.

I suppose that in the end, I don't have any major insights to impart you with, or any conclusive thoughts at all, really, it's just been on my mind today. I randomly will think about how lucky I was to be born in middle-class America rather than here for a whole plethora of reasons... today's reason is the extent to which I never went without and never had to want like these kids do.

I'll probably end up buying that car for Ardent, if you were wondering.