...even to ends of the earth

A short time ago the women’s team of our community development project started a new hygiene health and sanitation course.  The course started after the team made some visits to the 8^th and final community in the large village on the east side of the river.  They have been offering hygiene health and sanitation courses for women in this major village for over a year.  They started in a community they assigned the number 1, and have gradually progressed.  Now they have finally reached the last community in the village, and they have realized that this is the poorest community (17 families) in the whole village (over 1000 families, big village huh?) 

Last week our women reported some interesting stories about the 17 families in this community.  It seems that about 9 years ago, this group of families made a decision that they could no longer sustain life in their remote mountain village in another district.  They lived way out in the boonies, in a place where there is no arable land, so they depended on their flocks of animals to survive.  This also was not easy, because the mountains were made up mostly of a red sandy stone that was brittle.  All too often an animal would slip on the mountainsides because of this brittle rock, and fall to its death.  One drought year the whole village nearly starved because they had lost so many animals to the climate and the land.  So they decided to do the impossible and try to move close to a town.  They didn’t have any relatives near a town that could help them, so that first move of 4 of the families was an extremely vulnerable time.  In this culture people don’t stray far from their tribe, especially to become renters among another tribe, but that’s exactly what these families did, having no other choice.  Somehow they found permission to tenant some land on the far edge of the village, far from the irrigation canals and roads.  That is where they have been for the past 9 years, and every year they scrimp and save and struggle to bring another family or two from the red stone mountains, to their new promised land. 

Our staff have remarked over and over about how interesting it was to find that this village, by far the poorest, has been the most content and most grateful for anything we could do for them.  When the community was facilitated in selecting who would take part in the hygiene health sanitation course, there was no fighting at all (there’s almost always fighting at this stage).  When the course started, no one held it up with complaints about why we would not give a bag of flour or pay the course participants to come (this is also a common occurrence).  The course started smoothly, and after 6 meetings together, the experience continues to be positive.  Our female facilitators excitedly told stories this morning about how eager this community has been to learn.  The only problem in the course had been that older children were showing up at the lessons, and these kids can’t be turned away!  One kid spied on the course the first day, and told her friends what she heard, and they all applied it.  The next time our team came to the village, the girls all had washed their hands and feet (that were previously filthy), and were waiting with smiles.  One of our facilitators challenged he kids about how they would sustain the new practice, and an 8-year-old boy answered quickly saying, “it’s simple, when this first bar of soap runs out, we just need to sell 3 eggs, and we can buy another one.  We can do that any time we need more soap.”

I’m not sure about you, but this story makes me sad and happy at the same time.  Happy that such positive results have come from this community, but sad that it took so much time and effort to reach them.  It took us a year to deal with the more powerful people of the village, before they would permit us to help the really really poor people as well.  They hide their poor, rather than really advocating for them, because they’d rather pocket what we intend to share with the neediest.  It makes me sad to know for a fact that most if not all the other NGOs here miss communities like #8, because they don’t have the time to work at the depth we go to.  “The big boys” as I call multi-million dollar NGO programs, are geared to cover whole districts, provinces, regions.  This ends up to be just a sprinkling of aid here and there.  It’s like one story in a book I read often: crippled people gathered around a pool of water, waiting for healing if they can be the first in the water after an angelic stirring.  One man waits there for years, because there is always someone stronger and quicker than him, who takes his privilege, his turn to be healed.  Then a special healer came one day, and noticed that man, and met his need. 

Oh God help us notice the ones that you would notice if you walked through this land.