2 updates to "Collateral damage has a face"

Before reading this extra comments, read "Collateral damage has a face," posted earlier.

Monday morning I was in a field just outside of town, for an agricultural demonstration put on by another NGO.  I was the only foreigner among the 40 or so men there.  There were lots of long beards and tall turbans, but I was confident I was safe.  Some insurgents waffle back and forth between between being pro  and anti government, but on days when NGOs come with something to offer (this day it was tractors), these fellows will swing to the pro-government side, leave their weapons at home, and come participate like the common villager they are, in the event in hopes of getting something nice from the NGO.  My sense of security was rattled by the approaching sound of Apache helicopters.  These 2 choppers buzzed right over our heads.  I could clearly see all the artillery on these huge war machines.  They passed us quickly, then swung to the left and made another pass over our heads, this time slower.  I started to think myself, "I wonder who is here that they've been looking for."  The choppers passed us a second time and made another bend to the left, slowing and coming around for a third pass over us.  This time they really slowed to a near hover, making the dust in the field fly everywhere.  I had no idea what was going to happen next.  The possibility of the helicopters opening fire on us right there crossed my mind.  What could any of us do about it?  We were all sitting ducks, in a field, watching tractors complete a direct-seeding test plot.  They didn't open fire or drop missiles or anything like that.  Maybe it was impossible for them to do that, I don't know.  It seemed pretty possible for them to "kill them all, let God sort them out" (a slogan and bumper sticker I have seen several times in America).  It really would be a shame if I were killed by the military of my own country, because I was confused to be a bad guy, wouldn't it?  Do you feel that pain?  This is how I feel about the civilian casualties here.

And today I read an article titled "The forgotten wages of war".  It is relevant to the topic of civilian casualties, and I recommend you read it:

Click here to read the article

Hurray for the women

Since the other foreign couple that worked in our community development project left in October, I have learned a lot about the women’s work.  My wife T comes over to the office to socialize with the women’s team, but for work matters, I’m the only foreigner left for them to voice their concerns to or get help from.  There are 8 women on the team, 4 that have been with the project since the start in 2005, and 4 that we hired new last March.  We doubled the size of the women’s team because their participatory tools, courses, and monitoring and evaluation is more time-intensive than the men’s often “one-off” style of working. 

In a culture where men and women seem to live in different worlds, our teams have found a smart way to work together.  Our men’s team assists our women’s team by being the sort of chaperons and gateway guards that women in this culture must have.  At least one of the men always travels with the women, and hangs out near where the women are working, to stand up for them if some trouble arises.  Before our women can bring any sort of material to share with village women (training materials and aides, films, etc), the men take samples of the material and have a quick sitdown with the mullahs and other big men of the village.  Without this simple explanation and introduction by the men, our women run a great risk of being labeled as proselytizers, harlots, or spies- all of which could get them stoned.  Once the men get the nod, our women can safely go ahead, and any gossip that starts will be stopped by the male leaders of the village.

Our women’s team assists our men’s team in return by being informants about the inner-workings of each village.  While the men can walk throughout the whole village (unlike the women), they cannot freely go into private yards, which are surrounded by tall mud walls.  The women, however, can and do go into private yards all the time, and so it is very useful for our men and women to have a discussion early on in their time in each new village, to compare the information they have about life and needs both inside and outside the walls. 

With all of this introduction out of the way, I am pleased to share some actual results of the women’s WASH (water, sanitation, advocacy, hygiene) work with you.  In the past month the women have been doing the first +1 year evaluations of their WASH courses.  This is our first chance to get a real statistical gauge of the learning and change that happened in the hygiene courses 1 year ago, and that which still remains.  The way that this evaluation works is that our women conduct a KAP survey (knowledge, attitude, practice) before the course, and then repeat the same KAP survey 1 year after the course has concluded.   The KAP surveys require excellent facilitators who know how to turn the list of questions into a fluid dialogue which elicits the village woman’s understanding and belief about WASH.  Then the skillful facilitator also weaves an actual walk around the yard into the visiting time, so that the WASH practices can be observed.  By doing the same survey before the course and 1 year after it, findings from both surveys can easily be compared to see the impact on the cognitive, emotive, and practical levels of WASH in each village where our women have a course.  Below I will give you a summary of the most significant findings from the first three villages we have evaluated:

Knowledge changes:

• Understanding that unclean water is the most common cause of diarrhea increased from 64%-100%
• Understanding the causes of diarrhea in children:
• Flies: 10% - 90%
• Germs: 25% - 80%
• Not washing hands: 25% - 90%
• Understanding how to prevent diarrhea in children:
• Washing hands after toilet: 45% - 100%
• Washing hands before cooking: 27% -100%
• Washing hands before and after eating: 19% - 89%
• Preventing and killing flies: 10% - 90%

        Attitude changes:

• ·      Reasons for washing hands:
• To avoid food contamination: 33% - 93%
• To keep good hygiene: 20% - 89%
• To prevent disease: 52% -100%
• ·      Reasons to have a latrine and keep it sanitary:
• Disease prevention: 38% - 97%
• Preventing flies: 26% - 100%

     Practical changes:

• ·      Pre-treatment of drinking water (boiling, filtering) increased from 30%-100% (this is in villages where drinking water is gathered from streams).
• ·       Handwashing with soap increased from 41%-100%
• ·      Treatment of children when they have diarrhea: giving ORS: 20% - 100%

And my favorite finding: Before the course, over of 90% of the women in the courses had at least one family member with diarrhea.  Exactly one year later, close to

90% of the women reported no diarrhea in their families at that time.

Certainly our work is not about stats, but this evaluation does help us to know that this course has been worthwhile, and worth continuing! 

In 2011 the women’s primary purpose was these WASH courses.  For 2012, this course will be continued by 4 of our women in new villages, and the other 4 have just started a training we call BLiSS (Basic Life Saving Skills).  The BLiSS course is a very interactive course for traditional midwives and mothers.  We feel this emphasis is also critical here, where maternal and infant mortality figures are still so disturbing.  In one of the BLiSS courses we just started, the women reported that just 3 weeks ago a mother and baby both died during labor at home, just a few kilometers away from the hospital.

Please pray and cheer for our women’s team to continue to serve the women of this country with excellence, and that lives would be saved and transformed because of their interventions.  

Collateral damage has a face

 We were just outside the NATO camp last week when a local family came up to us and asked us for help getting medical care from the hospital within the camp.  We honestly have no contacts with that hospital, so there was nothing we could do.  The woman showed my wife her bandaged arm, and said she had been shot during a joint-military operation 5 nights ago.  The woman appeared about 20 years old and had a 3-year-old child beside her, and the man must have been at least 60 years old.  We understood them when they spoke in the language we know, but they would also drift into their village dialect that we don’t understand.  What we did understand, from looking at their eyes, was that they were exhausted, scared, and just plain sad that they were going through this.  The woman had been wounded in her home village, 2 districts away.  Since she was wounded by soldiers, she was entitled to medical care at one of the army camps. 

I hate war.  The longer I am here, the more I hate it.  I hate what it does to humans. 

I hate when life is reduced to a tolerable proportion of loss, in the achievement of a stated mission.  I hate that people like this 20-year-old woman are nothing more than a statistic.  Where was she supposed to go, when soldiers descended on her house in the middle of the night?  How is she to know who the “good guys” are, when they storm into her house and she is accidently shot?  How should she feel when she has to accept medical care from the very men that shot her, even though it brings great social shame on her to be touched by these strangers.  They tell her to come and get follow-up medical care at the army camp.  Is she supposed to be relieved by that?  Now she has to choose: does she risk infection in the wound if it goes untreated, or does she risk her family’s safety traveling a full day, outside of her tribe’s land, to reach the army camp?  If she can reach the camp, does she really want to face the foreign soldiers again, remembering their faces when they burst through the door of her house?  Would her family even let her get this medical care at the camp, knowing that the insurgents are hunting and killing anyone that associates with the army? 

Next time you hear about civilian casualties in this country, think of this girl, and think of the amount of courage it takes for any of the common, neutral people of this country to just live here.

Birdtales

My barber stole my bird.  No that’s too harsh.  I lost it, and he found it.  I bought “Perry” in the bird bazaar in the capital city in Dec 2010 when we returned.  The bird bazaar is a story of it’s own, that I won’t go into now.  T’s mom was with us, and actually gave Perry to us as a gift.  Then we traveled through the capital city airport, with a bird, in a cage.  Not a big deal really, we did this in 2008 as well with “Firni”.  Actually carrying a bird through this airport is one of the easiest ways to get through security checks.  The guards melt when they see the little song bird, and just wave us through.  Perry the canary was a great pet, we enjoyed his songs so much, and little t loved to sit next to the cage and watch.  On nice days, we hung Perry’s cage from a tree outside so he could enjoy the sun.  Then one day we came home and the bottom of the cage had fallen out, and Perry was gone.  End of story?  We thought so…

Yesterday I was getting my hair cut by the usual fellow I go to in the bazaar, and he was telling me about his birds.   I had noticed his birds before, but they were hung in a place where I could not get a good look while I was in the barber chair.  This time he told me that one of his customers had wanted to buy one of his birds, and had said to him, “name your price, I’ll pay anything for that bird!”  My barber replied to this customer that this bird had been given to him by God, and he would not sell it.  The barber then went on to tell me about the day last spring when he heard a great song, and went to the street to see a beautiful canary there.  It took him a while, but he managed to carefully catch the bird, and has kept it in his cage since then.  He then said to me again that after God had given him such a nice bird, there was no way he could sell it, not even for a high price.  This is remarkable since this guy is really poor.

So, Perry lives on, and his songs are a blessing to my barber and his customers.  I didn’t accuse him of stealing my bird, and I didn’t ask for it back, it just didn’t seem right.

...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.

Zip's advice

 One of our community development facilitators (I’ll call him Zip) was recently doing some shopping in the bazaar when he heard some men conversing, and the topic of taking a second wife came up.  Zip tuned in and heard one of the men say that he was tired of his first wife, and if he could find the money he would take a second. 

“I heard you want to take a second wife if you can find the money,” said Zip, “and I have good news for you.  I will give you the money you need for your second marriage.”

The man straightened up and asked Zip what he would have to do for this favor.

Zip replied, “I will give you the money you need for your second marriage, but first you have to do some things, exactly as I tell you.  Are you paying attention? Okay here is the first thing you have to do: you must to select and buy and use birth control for the next 2 years.”

“HOW DARE YOU SAY THAT!  You can’t challenge my right to have children!” screamed the man in return. 

“How many children do you have?” asked Zip.

The man thought for a moment, “Well I don’t know, they’re children, they’re hard to keep track of.”

“Exactly!” said Zip, “and have you ever noticed that your wife gets more tired with each pregnancy and birth and new child?  Now pay attention and listen to what else you have to do if you want the money I have promised you:

You must buy your wife a piece of fruit to eat every night.  DON’T let your children eat it, save that piece of fruit especially for her.

You want a beautiful wife right?  You must give her something beautiful so that she can be!  Buy her a new dress, perfume, jewelry.   

Lastly, you must give her a break.  Every day, you need to be at home and take care of the children for 2 hours so that she can take a break. 

You do these things, and then in 2 years come and tell me you still want a second wife.”

Popularity contest

Today we finally put some structure around a question that has floated through our project for the past year: “How do we make it popular?” 

Examples: Soap, toothbrushes, rubber gloves, biosand filters

Of the above examples, soap is perhaps the best.  In our hygiene course we make the point very clear that handwashing after using the latrine and before you eat is pretty much the biggest measure villagers here can take to stay healthy.  We don’t just tell this straight up mind you, this comes after a week or two of participatory games and things that lead the village women themselves to the conclusion that the lack of handwashing is a big problem for them.  Then we bring in soap and water and actually get them to practice a thorough washing, and they get to keep the soap.  Then after the course we visit the local shopkeeper with one of the locals, and together request him to make soap available at a reasonable price, because now people are interested in buying it. 

A few months after the course, we go back to evaluate each of the communities that took the hygiene course.  Our women visit with women in their homes, and men visit with men and the shopkeeper, to see if people have been applying what they learned.  One of the most telling parts of the evaluation is to ask the shopkeeper, “okay, really, have the people been buying soap or not?”  In some places, they have been, and we are extremely encouraged by this.  In other places, they have not, and this is disappointing.  A bar of soap sells for a few pennies, a price that even really poor people are willing to pay, for something that they want. 

This is why we keep coming around to this question, “How do we make it popular?”  What we believe it takes in this culture to make it popular is the following 3 things:

• ·      The people have to understand what it is, why it’s a good thing, and how to use it.
• ·      The local shops have to have it available, and for an affordable price.
• ·      The neighbors have to have it (or at least covet and talk about it).

We take various initiatives on the top 2 points, but still it seems that without that third point being present, it does not spread. 

So what do you think?  Is there more to popularity, and is there more we can do?