Gap day

Our work week here starts on Saturday.  One of the first items of business is exchanging the weekend “gap” (which means talk, or gossip, in the local language.)  A little bit of gossip at the start of the week is not a bad idea in a place where we have to be very conscious of the security situation, and we need to be attentive to people’s ever changing needs.  So I meet with the men for the first half hour to hear the gap from them, and then I hear from the women in the second half hour.  After this we have a weekly feedback and planning meeting, in which the gap swap continues.  Lately I have come to look forward to the Saturday morning routine, because there has been some good stories and encouraging news shared by the team.  Of course, it’s not all good, there are also some bummer stories, so I will start by sharing a couple of those with you, and then I’ll share some more positive ones.

The bummer stories of the last 2 weeks:

A few nights ago some guys lobbed 2 rockets at the gate of the NATO camp.  It was loud, even here on the other side of town.  It didn’t break the gate though, nor did it injure or kill anyone, and the next morning, it was business as usual throughout the town.  It’s disappointing that even in a calm season some guys decide to do this, just to keep us well aware of what is going on in the rural districts around us.

There’s been a lot of snow and rain this season, which is great for crops in the coming year, but really bad for marginalized people in unsafe housing.  We have heard of a couple of roofs collapsing in old mud homes.  The worst story was about a house just below a cliff, that was completely demolished and covered by a mudslide, killing the whole family sleeping inside.  This was less than a mile away from us, and the community has been somber about this for days.  We are trying to get a disaster specialist here to give us some training in disaster risk reduction so we can better understand how to work with whole communities to help these marginalized people move to safety.

  Last week, in one of the villages where we have sanitation projects ongoing, a woman was using her old latrine when all of the sudden the rotting wood floor beams broke and she began to fall in.  Most latrines here are 6-10 meters deep, so falling in means you could die, or at least it’s going to be really hard to get you back out.  Lucky for this lady, there was a bicycle parked in the latrine (what you don’t have a bike in your bathroom?), and she grabbed hold of the bike’s front wheel as she fell in.  The bike wedged against the floor, and the woman hung on to that wheel for dear life.  Someone came to rescue her, dangling from a bicycle, under the floor of her latrine, before she fell in the poo.  See this story had a good ending, but because it’s so gross I also wrote it with the bummer stories.  After one of our team members told this story to the whole team, they became very concerned that our office latrine (with an old wood floor) may collapse on them.  I told them that I would hang a strong rope from the rafters, and they could tie it around their waist before they squatted to do their business.  Huh, they didn’t take me serious, and instead went on to fix the floor with rebar and cement. 

The better stories:

Our BLiSS (midwife) courses are going awesome!  The interest that these courses have generated is such an encouragement.  We work in a place where the expectation is that people will be paid to come to any training, because that has been done over and over again by the other NGOs here.  Despite that, we have succeeded in filling these classes with volunteer participants!  Not only that, the team reports that these women are gathered in the muddy road waiting for the course to start each morning.  Other NGOs have started to ask us what we are doing to have such enthusiastic participants, and when we say we don’t pay them, they don’t believe it.  The truth is, our facilitators are excellent, and the way they do this training really draws the women in.

Already, two lives have possibly been saved thanks to the BLiSS training.  One was a birthing mother who hemorrhaged, and the midwife, who was in our course, realized that she had to quickly get her to a clinic (she admitted she would not have known prior to the course).  The other life was a week old baby that was struggling to nurse, and the mother had given in to the cultural remedies of giving the baby oil and other things that babies should not have, and it was not well.  After the lesson on breastfeeding, the mother stopped her other work, sat down and devoted an entire day to one task: helping her baby get breastmilk (first from a cup of expressed breastmilk), and learn to nurse.  The baby is doing well now.

The midwives and mothers participating in the BLiSS course are enthused about what they are learning.  This morning our women said that a number of the participants said they never knew that foremilk was so important, and never knew that they should wash their baby in the first month!  Other women said they were glad to learn the importance of using a clean and sterile blade to cut the cord- they had typically just used 2 stones!

In other project news, we are glad to hear that our simple greenhouse program has been sustainable.  Some of the women that we trained last year have made their own greenhouses this spring, with no further input from us!

The Biosand Filters (BSF) have held their value for the most part as well.  It has been very hard to push them to private market, but every now and then we hear a story about a family that had really been suffering from water borne diseases, and when they hear about the BSF, nothing could stop them from seeking out the factory and buying their own.  I heard another one of these stories this morning.

Hearing all of these positive stories, I asked the team this morning to think about how they can make these stories spread throughout the 15 communities we have worked in in the past year, to advocate for these good changes and good learning to continue.  We had a great talk about this, and what we concluded is that we need to treat these stories and topics not like a formal course, but like juicy gossip that just has to be passed on. 

More good news?  The annual report for 2011’s projects is actually going really well.  My local leaders are much better at reporting than at strategic planning and proposal writing, so I’m happy it’s the season for reports, not proposals!