What it took to sign the contract for the MZ irrigation water project

 A lot has gone on in the past week regarding the irrigation project that I wrote about recently.  Last week I thought we might have shovels in the ground on Mon or Tues.  That’s hilarious, because on Monday morning we ran into a challenge in the community that almost derailed the whole project!  The short story is: we got through it, and the project has started.  The longer story goes like this:

Got to the MZ village on Sun morning, went straight to measuring some fields to verify the irrigation sample figures we had received from farmers in the community.  We very quickly realized that the numbers had been skewed, either by hopeful bias (aka lying), or for not knowing better.  Went to other villages to get more sample figures to try to get better data triangulation.  Found some consistent figures.  Now we know more accurately what the irrigation need for the village is.  Success. 

Next up: afternoon meeting with village elders.  The point was to discuss the project design one last time before the contract meeting.  This is the point when it becomes real to everyone: this project is going to happen, say your beef, if you have one, now.  No one had any lingering concerns, so we planned to do contract meeting after supper.

We all split for prayers and supper, and when the men came back, it was a different feel altogether, and couple of the key guys were not there.  Where were they?  One man I had never met launched into complaints about the locations of both ends of the pipe.  Where was he during the surveys in the past month?  Why hasn’t this come up before now?  Arguments start between the men present.  My local staff, worn out after long days, join in the arguments.  Several attempts are made by the white beards to calm the arguments.  The one man will not back down, and his complaining gets obscene.  I sit and listen, puzzling for the background story on this one man.  I decide I will call him “saboteur”.  The scene is chaotic for 15 minutes, then finally one white beard gets control and says, “We’re going to quit arguing, because we’re here with our foreign guest.  We’re going to ask him to make this simple for us and say whether we can move the start of the pipe up the valley, or not!”  Simple is what I gave them, with, “Anyone who wants to discuss what has been surveyed and look at other possibilities, I’ll see you out in the valley at 6 in the morning.”  Goodnight grumpy men.

Next morning, out with the sun we were, walking the line planned for the pipe again.  We went first to the village side.  Saboteur was arguing for the pipe and project to better accommodate him, but his points don’t make sense.  He claims that one man will be upset because part of his field will be left out.  That man appears and represents himself, “I don’t have a problem with the plan that has been laid out.”  Saboteur gets really upset and obscene.  I regret I understand his language so well because his slander is raising my blood pressure by the minute.

We continue the walk to the source side.  My local staff and I stand on the spot we have carefully surveyed for the best possibility to gather maximum water and stand resilient to spring floods.  Saboteur’s slander continues.  We follow him up the valley to his proposal.  His suggestion is spending 2 weeks digging a large reservoir in the bed of the valley to get to “the real source” of the water.  In this valley that experiences violent, boulder-littering floods… it’s impossible.  I can’t figure this guy out.  I also can’t figure out the council leader, who sits idly by.  I call him out, saying, “you have been with us the last two three times we’ve been up here surveying, why have we not heard this other opinion before now, and why won’t you represent the opinion of everyone else right now?”  He stood strangely silent.  Saboteur is again slandering everything: our surveying, our local staff, our project that has done nothing, and I won’t say how he views foreigners.  I’ve had enough, I call my local staff to head back to the village.  Weighing for one more moment the pros and cons of speaking out, I go for it.  “Sir, this is a community project, and the community has led us to the plans that are now fully prepared.  Where were you when this was going on?  Have you sat back with the goal of wrecking this project?  Have you wanted everyone to lose this chance of irrigation?  You’re reaching that goal.”  And we exit, with swift steps down the valley.

Walking back to the village, my local engineer is charged and angry.  He is ready to quit working with this community altogether.  I calm him down and tell him to think it through.  We both calm down, and talk it through carefully before reaching our room in the community.  We decide that the council leaders need to be challenged about this lapse in their representation.  If this guy was credible, they needed to represent him earlier- why hadn’t they?  If he was nuts, why did they let him wreak so much havoc on last night’s and this morning’s meetings?  We decide to take it one step further, and let the council know that their leadership is so important to our projects that if they’re not going to take the lead, there’s nothing more we can do here, and we’ll pack and leave immediately.  A severe ultimatum of sorts, which should be used carefully, but it’s what we calculated as the best way to respond now.  If we went through with this, then only the action and request of the council could bring us back. 

As it turned out, we did not have to wait long for the action and request of the council.  As the men of the community returned from the valley, 3 key leaders made a bee-line for our room.  The old council leader, the new council leader, and one other key man came to our room and asked if we could solve the problem right away.  They apologized for the way last night and this morning had went.  Then they assured us that they had and will continue to deal with the saboteur.  They state that they have officially put him, under their authority, out of eligibility to hassle us any further.  We record the statement, and they sign and thumbprint that written statement.  Next they state that the whole community was in consensus opinion about the project, and wanted it to continue.  They asked if we would overlook the arguments and complaints of one man, and continue.  We agreed.  Then we all spent some time making statements that in essence smoothed the relationship back out.  They apologized for making the foreigner angry.  I assured them that I was not angry for any personal reason, but because of the great potential change that was being sabotaged by one man.  They liked that statement, and said that my statements in the valley to the saboteur woke them up to see what an opportunity they were potentially losing for the whole community.  That’s when they decided they needed to act and discipline the saboteur, and catch up to us before we left.

So, everything was smoothed out in less than a day since it all started to blow up.  That’s sort of how things work here sometimes.  The above is the story as it happened.  Now, let me add a little underlying meaning for you.  The old council leader has been in that position for 22 years.  Just last month the others in the council, recently trained in community leadership by our local staff, decided they wanted to replace the council leader.  They said he was not matching up to the standards that our leadership course introduced to them, and they had an idea of a man who would better fill the role.  The old council leader was not happy, but reluctantly accepting the will of the people.  The new council leader, then, was very recently chosen by the people, but not officially instated by the government yet, because election time has not yet come.  Due to this background story, my staff and I believe there was some political weaseling behind the above story.

The political conspiracy:

We believe that the old council leader paid or otherwise motivated the saboteur to do what he did.  The proof was in the way the old council leader stood by while it all happened.  It didn’t fit.  At the end of the night meeting, we thought that the old council leader was behind it, and that he wanted the project to fail, in an attempt to discredit the leadership of the new council leader.  This still seemed true in the morning, until we were ready to leave, and the old and new council leaders came to stop us and fix the problem.  Then the full motive of the old council leader was revealed: he wanted to save the community from the problem he had created.  The new council leader was also there at the solution session, but it was the old council leader who dominated with implementing the solution.  He definitely wanted his name on “saving the day”. 

I left shortly after this story finished, heading on to our two other villages to help with issues going on there.  I got home late that day, did some last checking of our calculations, and made some phone calls with the local staff in MZ to confirm their plan.  Spent most of 6-7am the next morning on the phone with them again, and by 7am, on Tues, the contract with the community was signed.  MZ village is officially moving ahead on their irrigation project.  Let’s see how much we can get done before freezing temps stop us.