mai
Its incredible to look around and realize that we are already into the month of May. The months here have slipped by, despite the sprinkling of days that felt as if they just might never end. But the signs are all there: the school year is almost over, semester exams are this week, the rains have arrived, and somehow the landscape changed from brown and dry to green and lush without my noticing.
People always talk about time flying though, so I guess I won’t bore you all with a life truth that you’re all aware of. Perhaps one of the most jarring things about it already being May, is realizing that the little routine I’ve set up for myself here is about to be disrupted. Classes are over, soon old volunteers will be leaving and new ones arriving, and my secondary projects are about to get off the ground.
The last month and a half has been full. I arrived home from teaching one day to find that my courtyard had been transformed into the site of a Bariba naming ceremony, which included an oracle, elders shaving heads, and facial scarring. Since then, the neighbors across the road have been announcing the oracle’s presence each morning and night with frantic, deep drumming. A lovely way to fall asleep and wake up…
As for the oracle’s actual duties; don’t ask. For some reason asking for any sort of explanation regarding these types of ceremonies results in frustratingly circular reasoning. For instance:
“What does the oracle do?”
“She tells people their Bariba names.”
“Okay, why?”
“So they can have names.”
Or:
“What is the orange dots on everyone’s head for?”
“Well, they wash it off.”
“Why?”
“To be clean.”
Riiight.
As per the women’s garden that I’m always blabbing on about, I finally turned in a proposal to receive funding for their water pump. A returned-volunteer in the U.S. has $1500 ready to give, as long as the application goes through before June. I’m hounding the Peace Corps staff to speed the process along.
Working with this group of women has been incredible, and has been a lesson in learning to trust. When I first began writing up the grant proposal, I told the women that they had to write up a budget for me within two weeks. Mostly I asked them for the information as a formality, and I’m somewhat ashamed to say, as a test. If they were able to get the information, whether or not it was accurate, I would know that they were serious about taking ownership of the project. So I was pleased when they brought the budget to me, written on a scrap of paper, in four days.
Pleased as I was with their speediness, I pretty much disregarded their information, and set off on my own to get quotes on the price of drilling, labor, and the actual pump. I visited three government agencies in big cities to get quotes, each visit taking a couple of hours, and each time the price quoted to me was outrageous (as in $6,000 instead of around $300). Finally, I visited the small county agricultural agency, and sure enough, the prices they quoted were exactly those that the women had originally given to me on that scrap of paper.
I think it’s worth it to state the painful obvious: I didn’t trust this group of illiterate, non-French speaking women to be able to accomplish the task I set out for them. And something tells me that this sort of thing is not an oddity in the world of development. There is a lot of talk of development efforts needing to be locally directed, but often that seems to just be empty rhetoric. Almost as if development agencies, development workers, and basically people with the money are saying, “The important thing is that these people think they are in charge of this thing called development, but we all know who’s really in control.” This sort of attitude is usually justified by corruption, sadly enough with good reason, and even incompetence. But this small experience with the women’s garden has reminded me that I’m not helping anyone by approaching this work with a jaded, suspicious mindset.
Even if this little rant doesn’t make sense to anyone who has never been involved in the world of development, I hope it at least makes one thing clear: people are to be taken seriously, regardless of where they’re from. Pity doesn’t get things done, cooperation and trust do.
People always talk about time flying though, so I guess I won’t bore you all with a life truth that you’re all aware of. Perhaps one of the most jarring things about it already being May, is realizing that the little routine I’ve set up for myself here is about to be disrupted. Classes are over, soon old volunteers will be leaving and new ones arriving, and my secondary projects are about to get off the ground.
The last month and a half has been full. I arrived home from teaching one day to find that my courtyard had been transformed into the site of a Bariba naming ceremony, which included an oracle, elders shaving heads, and facial scarring. Since then, the neighbors across the road have been announcing the oracle’s presence each morning and night with frantic, deep drumming. A lovely way to fall asleep and wake up…
As for the oracle’s actual duties; don’t ask. For some reason asking for any sort of explanation regarding these types of ceremonies results in frustratingly circular reasoning. For instance:
“What does the oracle do?”
“She tells people their Bariba names.”
“Okay, why?”
“So they can have names.”
Or:
“What is the orange dots on everyone’s head for?”
“Well, they wash it off.”
“Why?”
“To be clean.”
Riiight.
As per the women’s garden that I’m always blabbing on about, I finally turned in a proposal to receive funding for their water pump. A returned-volunteer in the U.S. has $1500 ready to give, as long as the application goes through before June. I’m hounding the Peace Corps staff to speed the process along.
Working with this group of women has been incredible, and has been a lesson in learning to trust. When I first began writing up the grant proposal, I told the women that they had to write up a budget for me within two weeks. Mostly I asked them for the information as a formality, and I’m somewhat ashamed to say, as a test. If they were able to get the information, whether or not it was accurate, I would know that they were serious about taking ownership of the project. So I was pleased when they brought the budget to me, written on a scrap of paper, in four days.
Pleased as I was with their speediness, I pretty much disregarded their information, and set off on my own to get quotes on the price of drilling, labor, and the actual pump. I visited three government agencies in big cities to get quotes, each visit taking a couple of hours, and each time the price quoted to me was outrageous (as in $6,000 instead of around $300). Finally, I visited the small county agricultural agency, and sure enough, the prices they quoted were exactly those that the women had originally given to me on that scrap of paper.
I think it’s worth it to state the painful obvious: I didn’t trust this group of illiterate, non-French speaking women to be able to accomplish the task I set out for them. And something tells me that this sort of thing is not an oddity in the world of development. There is a lot of talk of development efforts needing to be locally directed, but often that seems to just be empty rhetoric. Almost as if development agencies, development workers, and basically people with the money are saying, “The important thing is that these people think they are in charge of this thing called development, but we all know who’s really in control.” This sort of attitude is usually justified by corruption, sadly enough with good reason, and even incompetence. But this small experience with the women’s garden has reminded me that I’m not helping anyone by approaching this work with a jaded, suspicious mindset.
Even if this little rant doesn’t make sense to anyone who has never been involved in the world of development, I hope it at least makes one thing clear: people are to be taken seriously, regardless of where they’re from. Pity doesn’t get things done, cooperation and trust do.
posted by betsie at 3:51 AM
1 comments
