Scoring the First Goal

*This bog entry is dedicated to Linda P. from Akron, OH.*

Each person who swears in as a Peace Corps Volunteer promises to try their hardest to accomplish the Three Goals of the Peace Corps: to provide technical assistants on projects and exchange of ideas, to "promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served," and lastly to "promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans." By simply being in my village and talking to Malians about myself, my home, and America, I'm fulfilling the third goal. This article you are reading right now is me doing a rockstar job on goal number two. Pretty much any volunteer can do those two goals, whether they try or not, unless they are a total reclusive shut-in. But it's Goal Number One that really tests a PCV's mettle. I've been trying the better part of my service to get some good headway on getting "real work" done in my village, and it's only been the last few months that have seen significant results.

Early on in my service, over a year ago, I tried to utilize the training Peace Corps gave us in prioritizing which projects were the most important and feasible to do first. I told my "homologue," the Malian counterpart who has attended much of the same PC training sessions as I have and is acting as my local go-to-guy for any work or social issues, that I wanted to organize a meeting for anyone interested in starting an informal committee, one where I could more democratically decide how my work in village would go. I had dreams of weekly meetings, enthusiastic volunteers who would take matters into their own hands, and help realize the Peace Corps model for letting me be a catalyst for taking change into their own hands, rather than turning me into Uncle Piggybanks. What actually happened was that the afternoon of the meeting, my homologue, Kaou, drove around telling a bunch of his better educated friends to come over for some meeting. When I began the meeting, I gave a little speech with some examples of the kinds of projects I could imagine being successful, and over the next half hour, the attendees listed back all of the examples I had named, talking about how great they would be and how they would love to see me accomplish all of them because my poor little village could not possible front the money to accomplish any of this on their own. Clearly, there was a miscommunication of intentions..

In the end, they decided that the project they all wanted was for me to fix a water pump in the middle of town, but after over a month of telephone tag and missed meetings, I finally found that the cost of the particular project was unfeasibly high. Going back to square one, I told Kaou again, and in greater detail, how I wanted a next meeting to go, organized, formal, and with useful results that could lead to productive followup. And once again, it devolved into people shouting out any idea that popped into their head, most of them expensive and non-development-friendly.

Without going into too much detail, my service since then proved to be minimally productive in terms of the First Goal and I found myself settling into a pattern of general inactivity while at site. I found myself things to do to keep myself busy by farming corn and helping my friends in the fields during the rainy season, while helping villagers with their own home repairs in the dry season. I also did some "real" PC work, funding out of my pocket a repair of the village's major water pump, with the overly idealistic expectation that the pump's supervisor would collect money from the village to reimburse me. I also went around town for a while leading sessions on how to use chlorine to monthly treat well-water, making it drinkable. This too, was done with the overconfident sense that after giving people the chlorine to treat their wells the first time and teaching them how to repeat monthly to keep the water clean, that they would follow up on their own. But, as I deep-down knew would happen, not a single family ever performed a follow-up, as they were simply content having received the gift of sanitation once, however fleeting it was. The fact is that in Malian culture it is impolite, not to mention foolish, to ever reuse a free gift, be it from a friend or NGO. Of course they would take the chlorine, let me teach them how to treat their drinking water, smile as if they were interested, and never think about it again.

I was used to this reaction, since it was basically the same one I'd been getting all along, every time I tried to enlighten my neighbors to the benefits of washing with soap, treating drinking water, other basic sanitary practices to avoid illnesses, or any time I tell them about the ways that Americans do things like marriage or religion differently. I find it interesting that no matter how many times Malians say that they love America, that it is the greatest country in the world, and that they all want to go there, none of them have any interest in adopting "the American way," being totally comfortable with a distant admiration only. I'm still wondering if it is fair to call this hypocrisy, worshipping an object or idea so strongly without doing anything to emulate it or learn from its example, or if special allowance should be given to a society that is simply sticking to its traditional roots for the sake of keeping the status quo.

Towards the end of last year, things began to change. A elderly friend of mine approached me, offering to let us help each other. He was president of a local credit and loan association, and he wanted my financial assistance with a project. The idea was to install an electrical dynamo to a millet and corn-grinding machine that the association owned which would store the electricity and make it available for people in the town to buy. This would allow families to wire electricity into their homes and pay for it monthly, or for heavy-duty electrical work like welding to repair farm-equipment to used in town. The money raised would go to fund the association's other projects. This project sounded like a good idea, development-friendly in the sense of the village building its resources from it, and since it would be funded by the association and myself, we would not have to worry about the villagers themselves raising money, which for an expensive project, would basically doom it from the start as rural Malians generally like to spend the little money they have on essentials like food or familiar luxuries like tea (too often the latter) and rarely on anything that's new to them or that they don't receive a very direct and obvious benefit from. (People would wash their hands with soap every day if there was a soap that magically and instantly cured all illnesses like colds or diarrhea. Short of that, it's just another abstract change that may or may not make a difference.)

Shortly after, I got funding for a soak pit-building project, the effect of which would be that families have a simple, cheap way to get rid of wastewater runoff that keeps the streets next to the latrines clean of urine and bathwater. (Funded through African Sky, with donations from the Linda P. to whom this article is dedicated.) After a year of seeing my ideas for village-improvement either proven unrealistic or unable to solicit great interest, it was good to finally see some headway and a chance to do something to vindicate my time in Niantanso, both to myself and my community.

Of course, neither of these projects went off entirely without a hitch. The soak pits were slow getting started because none of the interested families, despite my occasionally nagging, ever did any of the initial work like digging the water-drainage pit to demonstrate their legitimate interest. As for the generator, months after my funding had come in, the association running the project still had not gotten their 30% contribution together, waiting for some of their debts to come in. Both of these problems were quickly rectified when my supervisor from the PC staff came down to Niantanso for a visit to make sure things were on track and to find out if my village really deserved a replacement for me when my contract runs out. Seeing how little progress had been made, she let loose with a scolding, seething hellfire and brimstone like a Southern Preacher, demanding to know why my village seems to have no motivation, no interest, and no work ethic to get anything done. Kaou and the association president were almost shaking with fear by the time she was done with her reprimand, and within only a couple weeks, the association had raised the funds that they had not been able to gather in the last 4 months (since apparently they had five million CFA in debts uncollected around town, out of the paltry 160,000 CFA they needed for this project) and almost overnight, five gaping holes in the ground had been dug next to five of the dirtiest, smelliest latrines in my side of the village.

So far, a number of other soak pits have been built – though the enthusiasm has slowed down – and the generator has been installed and tested. Unfortunately, none of this happened soon enough for me to start any new big projects before the rainy season where everyone practically lives in their fields for 5 months, and even then, I'm still wary about having another large funded project begin, since even something as simple as raising pocket change from families around the town to fix a water pump desperately in need of fixing had proved a practically impossible undertaking.

Not too long ago, a French couple stopped in Niantanso for a couple weeks to do research for a development project they were planning. We had a few long talks about the best way for outsiders to do work in West Africa. Their findings were that the culture here too often seems to be more interested in handouts than participating in good projects that will better the community with their own involvement. Part of that is because they are used to organizations that do actually give handouts, the proverbial fish instead of the fishing lesson. There are occasional times when the handout is a capacity builder, like giving certain villagers goats to raise, so that when those goats have matured and reproduced, they can be redistributed throughout the town and everyone wins. These projects fail when the villagers fail to maintain the goats and eat them, neglect them, or horde them. The couple was much more confident in the classic model when we simply do "capacity building" and simply educate and enlighten those in need of aide, giving as little material as possible, but the more we talked, the more we just came up with endless examples where this approach also floundered because of lack of motivation or genuine interest on the part of the community, or satisfaction with the way things were, not wanting to do anything more productive than just complaining. We came to the sobering conclusion that there is still no surefire way to determine which projects and development strategies will be successful, and the best we can do is hope that not too much money and resources are wasted before the underdeveloped world can get onto its feet. There is little question that people in Africa, South America, and all the impoverished places of the world would be happier if they were richer, healthier, and more a part of the global community, but the difficulty arises in finding out how much they are willing to do to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. These questions are especially pertinent for people like myself, when I have to make decisions like whether or not a project should really be done, or if I should even be replaced by a new volunteer when I leave, or if the village actually deserves another American who, despite all his efforts, is unable to shake the conviction that Westerners are just here to throw money around. After over a year, I am finally feeing good about having done something to really help my community, yet despite my excitement, I'm still wondering if it's even worth it, or if it's just a temporary fix, and if I myself am really qualified to do anything more than that anyway.