February 17, 2002
What a fun time we had as five of the new Peace Corps trainees visited Taabo for the week last week!! One of the language instructors accompanied them. Six visitors in Taabo is news for the entire town, especially when five of them are white Americans.
These trainees - Dave from Alabama, Katy from Boston, Olivia from California, Rebecca from Boston, and Kent from Oklahoma - have only been in Cote d'Ivoire three weeks. They arrived on January 24, and are part of the 40 new volunteers who will swear in on April 11. Half are rural health volunteers and half are water sanitation volunteers. My guests will be water sanitation volunteers.
My new friends range in age from 23 to 27 years old. Poor Katy never studied French before she came here, so she has a full three weeks of language training under her belt. Dave, on the other hand, had five or six years of high school and college French. The others fall somewhere in between.
This week - called the week of demystification - is a new addition to the eleven week training program. I think it's a great idea. The trainees are sent out in small groups to see what a volunteer's life (house, work, friends, etc.) is really like. As they complete the next eight weeks of their training, they can refer back to their week at the volunteer site for a "reality check."
I remember the third week of my training vividly. It was the week when all this different food and water finally caught up with my intestinal track. I was sick, I was tired, my French was terrible, I was hot, and I was looking at another eight long weeks of training. I kept that in mind as I planned the week for my visitors. I planned for lots of American food, American music, and English to give them a nice break. We made spaghetti, lemonade, chocolate cake, iced tea, banana bread, and twice baked potatoes. Because I could not find host families to house my visitors, we rented one hotel room with air conditioning and hot water (8 dollars a night). The trainees took turns sleeping there or at my house (with two fans). Everyone enjoyed Taabo's swimming pool.
The week was so much fun that the trainees made up a tongue-in-cheek Top Ten List of Things They "Hate" About Taabo.
10. Availability of refrigeration and ice at Kate's house (for iced tea and lemonade) make drinks just a little too cold.
9. Katy's synchronized swimming practices never end on time.
8. Thighs now out of shape from using toilet seat all week - will have to build up latrine squatting muscles again.
7. Having drinks with the Sous-Prefet (county commissioner) sitting in her air conditioned living room on couches really quite stressful.
6. Fresh bread directly from bakery is sometimes too hot to hold.
5. Lost taste for fine African foods like foutou (mashed plantain bananas and yams) by cooking American all week.
4. Burned hands cutting freshly baked chocolate cake.
3. Cooking yummy American food will cause us to gain all the weight we've lost so far in training.
2. Hot showers in hotel room steam up bathroom mirror.
1. Running air conditioner all night in hotel room makes room a bit too cold.
As you can tell, the trainees enjoyed the break and we had a good time.
On the other hand, demystification is tough, and the trainees saw a lot of things that were difficult. I had forgotten how much I've gotten used to, and how much I have learned about Africa.
The tour of Taabo included seeing the streams of sewage that I'm working on fixing. Seeing all the open sewage was very upsetting to the trainees. It was made worse when they saw kids running around the streams without clothes or shoes (kids under three years old are routinely naked) and animals drinking out of the streams. The trainees also noticed some food processing equipment right next to the streams. Everyone agreed that once the funding for the project comes through, getting the sewage out of Taabo is a huge priority.
Since these volunteers will be water sanitation volunteers (I am an environmental volunteer), we visited two villages to talk about their water pumps. Here in Taabo we have piped "city" water, but the villages around Taabo all have public pumps. I'll take a minute to describe how the village pump system is supposed to work.
Hydraulique Villageoise (HV) is a government organization that digs pumps in villages. There is supposed to be one pump for each 500 people. The pumps are dug deep enough that the water is available all year (even in the dry season) and is clean to drink without treatment. Most HV pumps are over 20 meters deep, some much deeper, depending on the level of the water table.
When HV digs a pump, they make the village form a pump management committee. The committee is made up of representatives from different families in the village. The committee is to collect the money from the sale of water, provide basic preventive maintenance, and budget for major repairs. One bucket of water - about five gallons - is sold for 10 cfa, or about one and a half cents. This is relatively affordable in most villages.
If the pump needs a simple repair, someone on the management committee has (in theory) been trained to make the repair. If something more difficult is needed, there is an HV-trained repair person in each region. Our HV representative is located about 30 km away. The parts and the labor are to be paid from the money collected from the sale of the water. In the case of a repair so advanced that the HV repair person cannot make it, they call HV in Abidjan for help. Again, the travel, labor, and parts would be paid from the water fund.
What often happens is that money is not collected or saved properly. This is very cultural, and has taken me a long time to understand. If you are part of the chief's extended family, for example, you never pay for water. This really gets to me, because the chief's family is probably the richest family in the village, and therefore the one most easily able to afford the water. But, rank has its privileges. Or, if you are in charge of collecting the money (this rotates weekly among the members of the committee), you might take half the money for yourself before putting the rest in the bank. Or, perhaps you don't use a bank at all for the water money, and someone steals the cash box. But what is probably most common is that if there is ever a sizeable balance in the water fund, it is spent on a funeral. Burying your relatives in style is so important here...and planning for the future is so foreign...that people will give away all the pump money...leaving them with nothing but a broken pump and no money to pay for it.
And what I've said before about bad development policies plays into this too. We can all agree that we don't want people drinking dirty water. The health ramifications are just too severe. So, if you steal or lose all the money for pump maintenance, someone somewhere, the government or UNICEF or someone else, will take pity on you and give you another pump. Why even try to save and budget the money properly? Why not just let your pumps break and then wait for someone to give you a new one?
I scheduled one visit to a village that has working pumps and a good management committee, and one visit to a village where the pumps and the management committee are broken. The "good" village, Kotiessou, was a much easier trip. They have four pumps. One is currently broken. That pump was installed in 1972, so my bet is that it's beyond repair. Seems like 30 years is a long time for a pump to last. The committee collects money and puts it in the bank in Taabo. The committee also greases and cleans the pumps regularly. The committee thinks that about 98% of the people in Kotiessou use the pump water exclusively. However, when we visited the local pond, we saw several people filling up water jugs.
Ahondo, the other village, has six pumps. Five have been broken for more than a year. Don't miss that - the people of Ahondo have been drinking (bathing in, cooking with, etc) nothing but river water for more than a year. The city of Taabo just paid for and installed a new pump in Ahondo on 12/27/01. (The mayor of Taabo is from Ahondo.) The pump management committee hasn't agreed to adopt the new pump yet as their responsibility...no one is collecting money, no one has greased or cleaned the pump since it was installed. When I asked why the committee hasn't adopted the pump yet, they said the village elders need to vote on it.
The village made me so mad with their poor management and "gimme gimme gimme" attitude that frankly, part of me says these people deserve to be drinking river water.
One interesting and disturbing thing that happened in both villages was the conversation after we were done discussing the pumps. I had not been to either Kotiessou or Ahondo, so this was my first meeting with the village elders in both places. The villagers were not going to pass up a chance to tell their Peace Corps Volunteer (me) what they need. I expected this; it happens everywhere I go. And since I am here to help, I really enjoy hearing about the priorities of the community. There is a lot of work to do, and I want to help do it if I can.
In both villages, they asked for latrines. I explained the standard Peace Corps latrine project - the village finds about 15 families who are willing to be educated about the benefits of latrines, dig their own latrine hole, and construct the walls (this could be as simple as a large sheet wrapped around for privacy). The Peace Corps will then pay for the bricks that line the latrine and the reinforced platform that one stands on.
Get this - in both villages, the chief responded that they don't need 15 latrines - they just want one built for themselves!!!
Of course, I stuck to my guns. I am not here to provide latrines for village chiefs...I am way more interested in helping lots of families. I was very clear about not beginning the project until we had 15 interested families.
Also in both villages, I was asked to find an eye doctor and a dentist, neither of which is available in Taabo. You either just suffer, or you have to find the money to go to Abidjan for treatment. Mostly, people just suffer. I started to talk about looking for an agency that could come visit for a couple days and treat everyone who needs treatment, but in both cases the chiefs stopped me...they aren't interested in treating everyone, just themselves again!!
I can't tell you how frustrated this made the trainees. To think that the chief, who is chosen to serve the people of the village, is asking for services only for himself, and not for the entire village, was very disheartening for the trainees. I explained to them later that I will not do work for the chiefs alone. Probably, I will tell the chiefs that it is against the rules of the Peace Corps, and that I must work with the entire community. (A slight but necessary stretch of the truth.) I try not to get discouraged by the chiefs' attitudes. It seems to me that these people have so little that they cannot think of helping others, only of getting more and more for themselves.
We were served lunch in Ahondo, rice and fish with peanut sauce. I'm used to eating village food in village conditions but this was new to the trainees. There must have been 200 flies around us (I have 20 bites on my back) and who knows how clean the plates were. But the gesture is so African...to feed a stranger...that you just cannot refuse culturally. I just kept telling them to be thankful that we got a bucket of water to wash our hands and forks to eat with!!
One other thing I have to mention is how dry it is here...we haven't had rain in a month, and there is dust everywhere. The transportation out to the villages was terribly dusty!! There were eight of us in a Nissan...three in the front and five in the back. You want the windows down because it's so hot... but that just lets the dust in all the more. When we got back to Taabo after visiting Ahondo, we were literally covered by reddish brown dust from head to toe! Our hair looked as though it had been colored, and I had marks around my face showing where I had been holding my bandana to breathe through. Rainy season starts in April...
After the tour of Taabo and seeing the two villages, the trainees also made a real Top Ten List of Things They Hate About Taabo.
10. Speaking in French all day is tiring!
9. Chicken and goat shit everywhere. Watch where you walk!!
8. Constant marriage proposals from locals.
7. Not too sure about eating sketchy food surrounded by flies in Ahondo.
6. Skin actually changed colors during dusty taxi ride (changed back after shower).
5. Watching people collect drinking water from dirty pond very disturbing (but they did brush away the green stuff first...).
4. Village chiefs asking for personal favors like latrines and eye doctors rather than being concerned about their entire villages.
3. Five broken water pumps in Ahondo, and no one greasing or cleaning the new pump.
2. Raw sewage running through Taabo
1. Demystification - we liked it better before we saw the truth!!
Like I said, we had a good week and the trainees learned a lot...some of it good, and some of it difficult. We spent lots of time talking about what a volunteer's job really is. Are we here to build latrines and sewage canals, or are we here to help people understand priority setting and planning for the future? I'll tell you what, it's a lot easier to find money for a new pump in Ahondo than it is to get them to see the benefits in maintenance, management, and budgeting, and then get their committee in working order.
I did have to laugh on Friday morning as we waited for the bus leaving Taabo to load. The starter on the bus is broken, so about eight men got behind the bus and push started it. We laughed as we watched that scene...somehow it summed up our new lifestyles here in Africa.