And then there were 3 water points

Just a note of hurrah to say that the community of AQ village have successfully dug the trench and buried the pipe for their additional 2 waterpoints.  They are waiting for cement to cure on the standpost pads, but later this week they’ll be able to turn them on, get accurate flow rates, and decide how to allot time for each of the 3 neighborhoods to collect water.  At the moment, in what for months has been known as “angry village”, everyone is happy. 

Good things are happening.  Now take heart, and press on with this next beast-like-1900-word post.  

Learning to do irrigation, the hard way

Tomorrow I might be ready for our team to sign a irrigation project contract in MZ village.  Of course I could have said the same thing three weeks ago, and between that time and now I have twice been ready to cancel the project altogether!  It’s anybody’s guess then how tomorrow will go!

More than a year ago, before my time here, the project team was working with the community at addressing different development hurdles and analyzing which ones could be addressed to provide real economic growth for the community.  Irrigation water was named, and so a search for an appropriate water source began.  The community first took our team up the mountain to see the spring that provided “this much” (picture hands round and wide enough to hold a watermelon) water.  They reached the hillside spring and found that it was only “that much” (picture fingers curled around a golf ball).  Thus the team learned early on that this community did not excel in precision of measurements.

All the irrigation options were explored: the upper mountain spring, an electric pump on the riverside with power from a hydroelectric project, a diesel generator, and a nearby valley stream.  All four of the options were ruled impossible for one variable or another: shortage of supply, no suitable site for hydropower project, and generators are expensive to buy and maintain.  The last option, the nearby valley, was pretty much tossed aside by the people of the community, because although some had used that water by means of a dirt ditch, they were not unanimous in feeling it would be a worthwhile source to work for.

The idea of irrigation for the village thus went dormant, until this summer, when the shortage of winter precipitation caused people to think again about the need for irrigation.  This time the valley stream was the first idea to be brought back up, and it quickly, somehow ironically, gathered a consensus opinion from the community: we want that water back!

With interest gathered, I went for a first look at this valley in July.  It was the first time that I had really pondered what it would mean to do an irrigation project.  As I thought about it, these 3 essentials came to mind:

1- Everyone in community must have access.

2- Water supply must be adequate for all to be reached, for the full season needed.

3- The project design must be doable, affordable, and sustainable.

Unfortunately I did not take a minute to write these down at that point, to make sure I got them in the right order.  Then this happened:

We thought we should start with #1 on the list above, so we surveyed and worked with the community until we had ironed out a plan so that all fields of all residents would be included.  I took encouragement in this, because I have heard of many irrigation projects in this country falling apart on this point alone.  I also took encouragement in the fact that the community, once in disagreement about the worth of the project, had united in favor of doing it.  I believed that if the community thought it was worth the hard volunteer labor, it must be worth doing.  I also thought that they could best judge the amount of water the stream would supply, because they had previously used the water coming in a dirt ditch, and thought that this was worthwhile.  Restoring this water source with plastic pipe would only increase the amount that reached the fields. 

My encouragement came from the social development potential I was seeing, but in the next step I made a mistake.  What I should have done next was carefully surveyed the actual supply and demand of water for irrigation.  I should have worked out point #2 before doing anything else.

Instead of getting specific data about the irrigation water supply and demand, I went on to surveying for project design, in other words: how could it be built?  I visited the valley four separate times, each time with a new design question.  I measured, thought, and planned carefully how to make a flood-resilient checkdam, how to minimize and clean out silting in the pipe, how to hang the pipe from a suspension structure to take the pipe across a 37-meter valley, and how to install pressure relief valves to keep the water flow moving well.  It wasn’t that I was engrossed in the fun of construction design.  It was actually rather stressful to face all these technical questions and have to research answers, because I had very little experience in addressing these matters.  So then why didn’t I realize sooner the importance of answering points #2 before moving forward?

I don’t know.  Like I mentioned above, I found encouragement in the development between the people in the community, and in the absence of any real experience calculating water supply and irrigation demand, I let the community and my staff woo me into thinking it would all be alright. 

Everything was looking alright, until I stumbled upon the right questions at the wrong time.  By chance, I asked some men in the village if they had any figures on amount of water needed for any sample size of wheat field.  One man said he has run a petrol generator water pump for 90 minutes to irrigate a field that he sows 6 sers (roughly 93lbs) of wheat seed in.  I broke that down and realized that with the 2.5” pipe from the pump he was irrigating over 36,000 liters per jerib.  At that rate, our project would require 2,781,000 liters to reach everyone one time, and with our current trickle of a flow rate that would require 128 days!

I went home dumbfounded, literally, because I had just found out how dumb I had been.  This was the first time that I considered canceling the project, because it seemed just plain impossible.  Then I got to work penciling out all the details and thinking of ways we could change this up.  I thought of restricting the field size per family that could be irrigated.  If no one could irrigate more than the average field size of all, that would reduce the irrigated land by 30%.  Not enough.  I took into consideration that spring flow rates are said to be much better, and made some calculations of what could be done with steady flow rates of 1L/second up to 5L/second (the max for our 2.5” pipe).  This brought the days needed down between 6.5 and 32 days.  An improvement, but much too big of a range, and too unpredictable!

The stress of this was getting to me, so I went to talk with one of my lead local staff on the weekend, and we formed a new idea.  We had not been able to built a hydroelectric plant there, and we had not been able to petition a neighboring villages to share their hydro power with MZ village, but perhaps we could petition for power only for day-time use, only for a pump?  We both thought this was a fantastic idea, because electricity here is mostly unused in the daytime hours.  Surely the other village would share their power for daytime use for our economic improvement project, right? 

We decided we needed an answer sooner than the start of the week, so we took off on our motorcycles the next day, to get an answer from the other village.  It was not fun to burn my weekend on this project, but I will admit that it was very fun to take this trip on my motorcycle!  The highlight was when we crossed the river by small raft!  Then we searched a couple villages for the boss man who could give us the answer we needed.  We had to climb into a high mountain village in the end to find him, he was there visiting a man who has just returned from the hajj. 

We sat down with boss man and the new hajji, and drank some tea and ate some chickpeas, raisins, and almonds.  We explained our situation and the petition of the MZ village.  My hope in this solution was quickly dashed when the boss man politely but resolutely denied our request.  Actually he fudged it more than anything, he said we could install a pump in his village and pump water to a ditch that would then flow back to MZ village.  A quick calculation told me that just the electric lines and cement for the ditch would cost more than double what we had budgeted for the project.  Thanks for the chai, hajji, no we can’t stay to eat the lamb you’ve slaughtered, maybe next time? 

Back down the mountain we rode, to the river that we would have crossed by raft again, but it was prayer time so the raft man had disappeared.  Probably for the best.  Balancing two motorcycles on a raft made out of just enough wood to hold four truck innertubes in a square was probably a bad enough idea to do once.  Home we went on the dirt road, which made me feel alive as ever.  Then I realized my cell phone had bounced out of my pocket, with over 150 contacts that were only saved on it.  Ahhhhhhhh.

Today I spent most of the day working with figures that I received from some reliable ag workers here.  I had asked them a few days before how much water was needed for wheat here, and one had replied.  I went to work converting acre-inch and gallons per minute figures to sers and jeribs and liters.  It was worth doing, because I’m encouraged by what I’ve found.  For example, alfalfa can be grown in Texas and Arizona on less than 16,000 liters per jerib; less than half of what the MZ farmer told me he was putting on his wheat field here!  I talked with my team about this, and they said, “well, how would he know what a jerib is?”  Yeah, we’re going to measure that field tomorrow.

Here’s the figures I am looking at now:

In the spring I estimate the valley stream can provide 4-5L/second, yielding enough water to cover everyone’s fields in 2.5-3.5 days, at a rate of 16,000L/jerib.  That’s doable, and will get them through the harvest of the winter wheat.  After that it gets harder to say what will be available for a second planting.  Right now I think the community would have to decide what their priority is for the summer: tree planting and domestic water (washing, animals), or irrigating a smaller section of their fields. 

So, tomorrow I go to MZ village, measure the one farmer’s field and see how many liters of irrigation he really applied, and head into discussions with all the white beards.  I’ll give them the good news that I think I’ve found for the spring season and first planting, and then call their attention to the careful planning and monitoring we will need to do for the second crop season.  If we can get some good negotiations started on this, and if no other crazy unforeseen events unfolds, we might be ready to talk project contract tomorrow, and have shovels in the ground on Mon or Tues. 

Or it might not happen, there’s really no telling what the next day will bring here.

Encouragement never hurts

Today I was in AQ village monitoring the progress on the additional water pipelines.  On Friday the community divided up 400 meters of distance that needed a 1 meter deep trench, and got to work.  By Saturday night one of the local staff in the village called me to say that the men were eager to bury the pipe in the first half of the ditch.  This morning, after stopping to address needs at the project in KT village (description coming), I got to AQ at 10:30.  The men of the village had scattered for the day, tired of waiting for me to get there and give approval for them to bury the pipe.  It's actually a good thing that this happened, because the trench was not deep enough, and I needed a chance to work some encouragement into a few individuals, and not be persuaded by an over-excited crowd.

While I walked the ditch through the quiet village, I measured a few spots, and noted the number of large rocks that needed to be chiseled for the pipe to pass.  My local staff walked with me, trying to convince me to give them the go ahead.  He was the first guy who I needed to encourage in order to get the momentum turned.  I started by asking him when the best time was to solve problems with a water supply system.  He and I both knew the answer: preventing the problems before the project is done.  I pointed to a few areas where rocks were forcing the ditch to jut left and right, and asked him when the easiest time was to remove those rocks: now, or January?  "Look at what these men and boys can do in just 1 day," I added, "They will not have any problem digging the ditch to 1 meter, if we encourage them to not give up and settle for a shallow trench that leaves their water supply at greater risk."

I continued to charge up this staff member with the task of building quality and problem prevention into this community's project, and he began to actively agree.  I then praised him for being attentive to the wishes and the pace of the community, but pushed him to see that sometimes we have to motivate people to go far beyond what they were prepared to do, so that they get the results that match their labor; results they deserve.  In this case, they needed a water pipe installed to a depth that is a standard acceptable to the frost and floods of this area.  Then he countered that that I don't know this environment like the community and he knows it.  I agreed, but maintained that we want to urge the community to use every tool they have to decrease their risks.  I assured him that there would be no regrets from working an extra day to ensure this pipe was safe for years.  Our talk went on for a while, and then we were joined by one of the men from the village council.

The staff member that I was talking with was not yet ready to ask the community to keep digging, so I turned next to this village leader.  I used similar messages, but mixed in with his much more positive appraisal of the work that they had done, pointing out the potential it showed for quick and easy completion of the full 1 meter depth.  He needed some examples of why it needed more work, so I showed him the rocks, explained how flow rate is affected by every added source of friction in the pipe, and that they could make the pipe flow better if their trench were done to standard.  We talked for a while, and discussed his doubt of the pipe freezing in a 50cm trench.  I then reminded him that this pipe was not always full of flowing water like a gravity-fed scheme, rather it sits full of unmoving water for most of the day, because of an electricity saving 1-way pipe valve that we installed at the top of the well (it doesn't allow any water to return to the well once it has been pumped out).  His eyebrows went up signaling that he understood.  I praised their hard work some more, and left the rest to him.

The village leader walked part of the length of the ditch, yelling out names of different families as he went.  It didn't take long for boys to appear from a number of the houses around, with shovels and picks in hand.  In minutes, this happened:

It was exciting to see how fast the community leader turned his opinion from "we're done, let's throw in the pipe and call it good enough," to, "let's spend the extra effort and do it right, right now."  The boys might not have been in full agreement, but they listened to their leader and got to work.

Within an hour, enough sections had been dug an extra 20 cm that it would be obvious to everyone which standard was now required.  The boys had set the new standard, and in the afternoon when the rest of the men returned it would be clear what needed to be done.  Well done boys, Monday is pipe install day on this side!

Before the snow flies

Right now is a busy time for physical projects in community development.  All the farm work is done so more men are available, and there are a few weeks remaining until it will be too cold to pour concrete.  In case you are interested I will give you the rundown of the projects we hope to finish before freezing temps and snow, and what each of the participants roles in the projects are.

Village "MZ"

Situation:  This village is eager to get irrigation working again in their village.  Until 3 or 4 years ago they were directing a mountain spring to their village with dirt canals, but the 700+ meter hillside canals were irreparably damaged by avalanches.  They know that we have done plastic pipelines before so they have requested for us to assist them in making their irrigation more efficient and durable.   

Project:  We are going to dam the stream coming from a mountain spring, and feed it into a 2.5 inch pipe that will run to the top of the village, where it can feed at least 3 different canal routes in order to irrigate all the yards and small fields in the village.

Community's role: They will supply all the labor and local materials.  That means rocks, gravel and sand for building the dam, canal, and settling pool before the pipe.  They will also dig a ditch by hand shovel, the entire 700+ meters length, 1 meter deep. 

CDP team's role: We will supply the non-local materials (like cement and pipe) and the engineering support that exceeds their own capacity.  We also advocate for the poorest farmers in the village to make sure that they do not have to work harder than others to get an even share of the irrigation water. 

My personal role: This is this team’s first irrigation project so I am responsible for making sure that it gets done right, and making sure the end result is just and fair for all in the community.  It's easy for guys to miss the social justice or injustice that happens in physical projects, so I'm working with our facilitators every step of the way to make sure that they are noticing all the times and ways that the project can go awry or poor people lose out.  To make sure it goes right I have to be the technical consultant, meaning that I take the plans of my local engineer and test and calculate them to make sure they will work.  The way he was surveying, for example, was lacking accuracy, so I made him a 5-meter fluid communicating vessel and trained him to use that.  We also have to stretch the pipe across a 35 meter valley, so as he gets his materials and plans figured out I'll calculate the weight and figure what kind of foundation anchors we will need on both sides of the valley.

Project cost: CDP team is budgeting $4000.  Local labor will be valued around $2500 (they won’t get paid, but this is the value we can attribute to their labor contribution, at the local labor wage)

Project benefit: In the fall this source will not provide much water (14,000 liters/day right now), but the community is very eager to restore this source of irrigation because of the supply it offers in spring and summer.  Using a pipeline will guarantee more water makes it to the village rather than being lost in the dirt canal.  Restoring irrigation will allow this village to double their first-season wheat harvest, plant fruit trees, and plant some second-season crops as well. 

Village AQ:

Context: This is the drinking water pipeline village (aka pants-less welldigger), so I have told this context on several chapters before.

Project: to divert the current single water pipe so that it sends water to 2 additional faucets in different parts of the village, by turn.

Community role: They first have to establish some agreements as a community, before we will start the physical works with them. Then they have to supply local materials and labor.  This means digging the ditch and bringing rocks, gravel and sand for the faucet foundations and valve boxes. 

CDP teams role: Same as in MZ: supply of non-local materials and technical support.  The team does have to work harder on the social aspects of this project, because the problem causing this project is partly their fault- they missed some important and powerful opinions last winter when they were planning the original pipeline. 

My personal role: This is the community that has experienced a number of petty conflicts (and some not-so-petty), so I have made it my job in this village to keep contact with several key people and support them in maintaining peace and cooperation among their own community.  I also play engineer in this project, but mostly I am using my technical work as opportunities to stay among the men and observe how the relationships there work.

Actually, my role in the technical aspect of this has been important, because we are nearing the limit of what the electrical submersible well pump can do.  It is rated for 120 meters of head, but calculating in the inefficiencies and friction throughout the system, and it seems we’re quite close.  Fortunately on Wed the team and the community were able to carry out a test that I gave them: they rolled 200 meter of 40mm hard plastic pipe up the hill, hooked it up to the reservoir, and turned on the pump to see what the flow rate would be at that higher elevation.  There was about a 40% drop in flow rate from that at the reservoir, but I think the community can reshuffle the number of families that go to each of the 3 water points, so that it stays somewhat equal.

Project cost:  CDP team is budgeting $800.  The communities labor is going to be nearly the same!

Project benefit: Simply put, this project makes 3 water points in a village that has had only 1 since we finished the well and first pipeline in April.  The reason that this is a big deal is that the village counts themselves as 3 neighborhoods.  When I finally realized that, and voiced that back to the community leaders, it changed the whole dynamic of how our relationships and work with them; we had finally seen life through their eyes.  You might still be asking: why 3 neighborhoods?  Gender, religion, age, and rich and poor all factor into this.  Women were not supposed to be crossing from one neighborhood to the other at the time of day that water was available.  Water was supposed to be more locally available for washing for prayers.  Men were continually cutting in line in front of children.  The rich were using vast amounts of water and the poor were not getting enough even for drinking.  Enough convoluted reasons for this paragraph?  To be honest, these new water pipes and collection points are not going to solve the whole issue, but they stand the chance of putting us in a better position to continue to work with this community and get some of these unsavory tendencies dealt with.  In the long run, I believe it will have been worth it to do this extra work and expense.  By the end of this week we should have the pipes installed and water flowing to all three collection points (one at a time that is!)

Village KT:

(writeup coming soon, it’s too late tonight!)

How do you face angry village elders?

This is a long post.  The meeting that I describe below concluded, then I sat down in a room here in one of our project villages and tapped out the story on my tablet while the local staff were busy. It was a new opportunity to record a full story with details that really describe what some of our work is like.  So, enjoy it for what it is, or skip it!

How do you face a group of village elders who have been angry for months about the results of your work? I was thinking this to myself for the past week while the plan was made for me to do just that. To explain why that became the plan, we have to go back several months.  Remember the well project with the pants-less well digger? What I haven't told, because I have just learned it, is that before I came to this part of the country the engineer before me was a bit careless in his surveying, and he led people to believe he was promising more than the project had capability to deliver. Without communicating much, he surveyed for a large water reservoir above the village, which could be the source for several gravity-fed pipes to different areas in the village.  To him it was just surveying for future but unfortunately the villagers that watched him do this believed it was the definite "phase II" of the project that he was looking at.  Learning this recently has helped me understand better why this community has had such a hard time managing to share the single reservoir we fixed and piped water to. 

The frustration from the community has come out in different ways.  Many of its members have complained that there is not enough water, or that they never get their turn to get water.   Another symptom has been that those living close to the reservoir have considered it their right to take as much water as they want, and those living further away do not have the same ability.  Those that are getting less water and hauling it more distance are quite disgusted with the others, and some have quit using this clean water source and gone back the river for water collection.

The unequal use of water, and those that have walked away from the clean water, poses more problems in regard to community's expense.  You see, water doesn't reach the reservoir for free, it is pumped up the valley from the well we helped them dig, and the community shares the electric utility expense on the well pump, as well as a monthly wage for local "water manager". Less people using the water means the division of the utility and wage goes up for the others.  Water hogs drive the cost up more.  In this situation it is understandable how those that are paying for water, but not getting enough of it, are furious.

So why don't people get enough water? It is not that the well runs dry and has to be shutoff to recharge.  It is a combination of the overuse by some, and the limited timeframe to collect water for all. The time to collect water is limited because the pump is only turned on for a few hours of the day. Why is that? Perhaps because they don't

want to run up the electric bill? Or because electricity is in only available part of the day?  No, it's actually because the pump is only run in the afternoon, which is when people are used to collecting water, and the afternoon is not long enough for everyone to get the amount of water they need, especially considering the water hogs! 

Wait, there's two more elements to add to the situation: gender, and age.  It used to be that water was collected by women or children, in the afternoon, as they would take their donkeys to the river and load them with water jugs.  Now that water collection has moved to the center of the village, in a religious space by the mosque, there are new dynamics.  Women who are not from the houses immediately around the reservoir are not supposed to be in spaces like this, so instead the men from those houses have had to collect the water.  Don't cheer about that however, because they have made it hard for the women and children who still collect water for their houses nearby the reservoir.  In this culture children and women are most always expected to yield to men.  Actually in this case no one is winning, everyone is angry.  The women from the far houses are angry because they can no longer get water with other women, and their men are angry because they have to get it.  Then the women from the nearer houses are angry because the men from further are cutting in line, and their men are angry because their women and children don't always get water. 

So, there's the stage of the situation. How would you have gone in?  I thought and prayed about it a ton, because I was very concerned about what could happen in this village if we didn't find a resolution. Finally when I left for the village I had three short lists: 1- things to listen for and encourage, 2- topics to steer away from, and 3- points to assert.  I won't even share those lists with you however, because from the first speaker at the meeting I realized it was going an entirely different route!

I arrived in the room with 10 grumpy, white-bearded elders, we exchanged nice greetings, then we got right to it.  The first man said, "from the beginning we were told there would be a big reservoir above the village (the one mistakenly surveyed), and we also need a backup generator."  I was taken aback because these first two points drove right into the areas I wanted to steer away from!  So, I asked them to tell me more about what it meant for them to not have those things.  As they described the problems affecting them, I began to weave in suggestions of my alternate solution, hoping we could leave their desired solutions behind.  Thank God it worked!  As I began to gain momentum with the suggestion of adding two more pipes instead of another pump and reservoir, I turned the discussion toward the social matters that were in their hands; matters that I saw as prerequisites to us doing any more material projects.  My one local staff who went with me (and sat by silently, thanks for the help buddy) said later that only a foreigner could address a circle of elders and say that the root problem was that the community had not made sufficient agreements.  i first asserted that they needed to agree on the limits for the use of the clean water or the abuses and frustration would continue.  I also asserted that until they made a daily schedule for water collection by the different parts of the community, that no amount of water or reservoirs would bring peace back to their village. 

With my chips on the discussion table, the leaders began to argue with me about the superiority of their solution.  They really wanted to skirt the difficult social matters and convince me to commit the funds to build them a bigger reservoir.  I didn't tell them no, but instead laid out the negative consequences I saw from their plan: people would continue to hog water, separating collection locations without a schedule would only slow the time it takes to fill each jug, and their electric expense would double with the addition of another pump.

At this point they turned to their village dialect (I had been talking with them in the national language) so that they could talk about me, in front of my back, privately.  Their interaction got quite heated, but eventually the leader turned back to me and said, "how do you suggest we go from here then?"  I laid out for them a four-stage plan: 1- they would determine as a community how the clean water may and may not be used (I.e. only drinking and cooking? Bathing also? Washing also? Animals also? Gardens also? Construction also?)  They would also decide a time of each day for each of the 3 sections of the village to collect water, and stick to this plan. 2- We will come next week, survey both the social matters and the physical possibility of adding two pipes to the two further sections.  If all looks good, we'll work with them to put in the pipes as soon as they're ready to do the labor.  3- then we will spend the winter encouraging the community to stick to the new system, and record their usage and expense over several months.  4- In the spring, if they still think another reservoir would serve them better, then we have the data to do a thorough operating expense projection, and can figure and share that with the community so that they can make an informed decision. 

More arguments followed, but my suggestion gathered enough acceptance right away that my new proponents did the refuting for me.  Another round of arguments in the village dialect solved, the leader turned to me and said, "your plan is excellent and appropriate, we could not have agreed on this without you."

Before we left the room I commented on their wish for a generator, saying that it was outside our policy (we only do renewable energy projects), but if they wrote a proposal we could advocate for them to other agencies. With that door for another false assumption closed, we called the meeting to a close, went outside and took a look at the locations for the suggested extra pipes.

The walking tour of the locations for the extra pipes was a great chance to listen to the elders more, and make sure they understood what they agreed with!  I'm still concerned that the men might not have understood me, but rather assumed they were hearing what they wanted to hear!  My other concern is if "the right ones" were not in today's meeting.  We should find this out in the next visit!

I sense that we are not out of the woods yet. There have been a lot of twists and turns in this story and I should not be surprised if I have still missed another angle of this situation.  The learning here never seems to end. 

Latrine monitoring in K.T.

 Today I went to one of the project villages to look at the latrines being built.  It was the typical trip with lots of little things that I could mention, but usually don't because that requires more energy than I usually have in the evenings.  You're in luck because I just got back from a break and feel motivated to "take you along" on this village trip by sharing my observations of the day:

Every trip is a small adventure.  Before leaving town my driver and I made some calls to check security.  There was fighting overnight near the airport, so we took the rough road instead of the main.  A few kilometers down that road our Toyota Hilux truck started to wobble like a penguin.  I told the driver to let me drive so he could observe and try to figure out what it was.  So there’s the driver running beside me watching the front wheels.  It worked, he noticed the part of the suspension that was moving wildly from a missing bolt, and we limped it back to town to get said bolt.  20 minutes later we’re back on the road.

Our male staff are enthused that the second round of 20 latrines has been progressing much faster than the first 20.  The first took 2 months to complete, but in just 2 weeks many of the second round were well underway.  Makes sense, now that their harvest is over, they have time to do our physical projects.

Lunch was delicious salad, carmelized squash in sour cream, and rice with chickpeas (a feast to welcome me back from my trip to Am-ree-ka).  There was even pudding.  Wow, they hardly ever make pudding in the village.

Out we went on the walking tour of 30+ latrines.  The village is big, about a mile long and a quarter mile uphill in width.  The entire place is on a hillside so strewn with avalanched rocks you wouldn’t believe that over 75 families live there, but they do.  We walk up and down the hill to zigzag to all the homes with latrines.  I see a number of positive surprises along the way, including the number of latrines that had been ‘boosted’ into commode-style latrines by the homeowners.  I say ‘boosted’, because we do not include commode fixtures or extra plumbing with our program, our latrines are more basic slab and pit latrines.  It’s amazing to see that over 50% of the people in this village have gone out to buy themselves commode fixtures and piping to connect to a remote pit.  Months ago when I first heard about this idea I was skeptical because I feared there would be technical issues and it would come back at us.  Quickly I saw that lots of people were eager for commodes, because a number of men had seen them and worked on them in a neighboring country.  Now I can’t help but stand back and think this is excellent, because a commode is much better than the standard slab at controlling flies and smell, and the porcelain white fixture is a beautiful thing to see in a dusty village.

I’m humbled to see that some villagers have taken our program so serious that they have prioritized building their latrine over finishing their home.  Many new homes are being built in this village; people are constantly moving here from overpopulated mountain villages, and starting over here.  One man struggled to dig a 5-meter pit through dense rock, then bought 12 meters of 4” pvc pipe to drain the commode he installed in his house, to the pit down the hill outside.  He was so proud, and the latrine and wash space was truly well done by his own handiwork.  It was only as I left that I noticed his wife rocking an infant in a rickety wood cradle, in a room with no floor covering or windows.

Next stop is a house that looks just as simple and poor as the rest, but his latrine is visibly different; the interior of this latrine has been plastered and whitewashed!  This was not the only latrine that had been fancied up, there are several that have plastered walls and handwashing points with soap.  Some have even been turned into a latrine/washroom by enlarging the floor space, cementing the walls to knee-high, and installing a floor drain.  Then my mind was officially blown when I saw a toothbrush and toothpaste sitting on nails, on the wall of one washroom/latrine.  That’s the first time in 6 years that I’ve seen a toothbrush in a local home here, and it was out here in a poor dusty village. 

On we go, one latrine after another.  Some are average, but most look really good.  Then we find one with a green door and window frames.  Awesome

Later there is a curious latrine that does not have a roof yet, but the hole in the slab is covered.  This tells me that the family has put the latrine right to work, and applied what they learned in the training about keeping the slab covered.  Nevermind there’s no roof yet, there’s no rain this month.

Most of the latrines have covers on the slabs, which is great because this is something the project didn’t supply; they had to get their own.  One family used what looked like the cover for truck air cleaner.  Whatever works!

To be honest not all the latrines were up to snuff.  Several were made with the technical suggestions of a certain man who swore he was a well-trained engineer.  Unfortunately he suggested they overlap their 2-piece slanted tin roof the wrong way, and when the rain comes they will be getting dripped on when they go to their latrine.  I pointed this out, but as I suspected, they all chose the “we’ll wait and see” response.  That’s fine, it’s their latrine, made with their own hands, so if it needs to be fixed, I’m pretty sure they’ll do it. 

One of the big surprises of the day was learning that my lead staff took the liberty to let every man build his own latrine, and be paid the mason’s wage for that.  The plan had been that 3 masons would be contracted to build the more technical parts of the latrine, together with trainees at each house that would learn the construction techniques.  At first I was disappointed with my staff leader and planned to make an issue of how his choice would make the community more dependent, but then I decided to first go and see the result of his leadership.  We toured on a great day, because a number of men were literally putting the finishing touches on their latrines.  I saw the pride and satisfaction on their faces, and I heard their appreciation of our project finally making it possible for them to “quit being lazy” (the words of one man) and take care of their sanitation need.  I was reminded of two points I read recently in a book titled “Poor Economics”.  The authors of this book argue that development needs to be tested and researched according to how each unique people group responds to different types of support or assistance.  They suggest that a handout or incentive is not always a bad thing; perhaps the handout is what convinces people to act right away.  This might cause concern that they acted because of the incentive, or that they would get used to handouts.  On this point, however, the authors counter that perhaps it’s not handouts they get used to, perhaps they rather get used to latrines, and never allow themselves to go back to life without them. 

I was still thinking about these points when my staff started to ask me how we will proceed with the rest of the community.  That is the question isn’t it?  I mean, no matter what we have done, where is it going from here, and will we be able to affect change in sanitation outside of the area where we give away materials and pay builders?  My staff must get tired of hearing these types of questions from me.

By the end of the week I estimate 35-40 latrines will be done in this village.  The goal for the year is 75 total, and then we will do another round of hygiene training over the winter for the 50 new families (told you the village is growing fast) before we do any assistance with their latrines next year.  What we will probably do between this year and next is transition to a new phase in which we no longer pay for any labor on latrines, we only supply materials not found in the village.  Most of my staff think this will be a mistake because people will not tolerate being treated differently.  My staff leader, however, agrees with me, that once there is a critical mass of 75 latrine-using families in a village, the social pressure will be on the other 50 to get theirs done, and they will be more inclined to do the labor for free in order to catch up with the rest of the community.  I wouldn’t be so sure of this, except that the commodes, white-washed walls, and the toothbrush tell me that this community has “got” the message on hygiene and sanitation, and they should be able to handle the continuation of the latrine project as the outside organization takes steps back and lets them do it.

We will see!  Ask me later about this village that we call K.T.!

Returning

This morning we stepped back into our home in Fize, after almost 6 weeks of traveling, family-timing, holidaying, traveling more, conferencing and networking, and traveling more.  There are always mixed emotions returning to our homes, and it is not always easy to even name what those emotions are or where they have come from. 

Let’s be honest, there are a variety of aspects of life here that are not exciting to return to.  The convenience I miss the most is a refrigerator, and the close second is a hot shower.  It is also hard to return knowing that I am not coming back to a job that is going well, in fact I’m coming back to address all the problems that I gladly left behind weeks ago.  The reality is that as soon as I deal with those problems, there will be just as many new ones, because our projects always seem to create issues before we can really help people make lasting solutions.  Oh the energy it takes to even think about that.  It’s funny how I often feel the most zapped when I return here from a break. 

In the first hours back in our house, there were so many things that I needed to get to work on, but my heart was really opposed, so I had to take a few minutes, find a quiet place, and talk to my Maker about the state of things.  Actually I didn’t communicate much, but rather I urged Him to speak up a bit.  It’s a shame to admit that I was surprised when He answered.  Maybe it’s because the answer came in a unique way.  All at once, my senses were opened, and a combination of present happenings and near memories popped into my mind like a film.  In a matter of minutes my consciousness scanned and senses absorbed the following things that are all right here:

-the laughter and play of hundreds of children in the school across the street

-the flowerpots on the street, but they are not flowerpots, they’re old tank wheels put on their side

-the men on the sidewalk who spend the whole afternoon playing chess

-the watchman who returned a bottle of perfume that my wife unknowingly dropped 5 weeks ago (rather than taking it home)

-the driver who was noticeably careful with the van full of young families (the same driver I threatened and nearly fired 2 months ago for not driving safe)

-my son who arrived and toured every room and corner of the yard with exuberant joy

-my wife who threw herself right into cleaning the layer of dust off of everything

-my daughter who vacillated between smiley giggles, and closed-eye head-bobbling, as she tried to stay happy and awake during lunch

These senses and pictures help on days when returning seems hard.  It is so great when help comes right when we need it.