New Year’s Report Part 3: Work!

Well, to turn to the serious side of things, we currently have three big projects going. Number one, the health clinic project that I started writing the proposal for this past March. After three rewrites of the budget, giving an extension to the groupement to raise their local contribution money, reducing the amount of the local contribution, kicking out a management committee treasurer who didn’t have time to help with the project then appointing a new one, and a fight with the groupement president about honesty, money, and beds (a long story, but suffice to say that the beds will be real mattresses, not old rice sacks stuffed with straw), I finally made the trip to Lomé to meet up with the infermier to order medical equipment, medicine, and a examination/birthing table on December 23. I was pretty impressed with the infermier and his confidence choosing and ordering what he deemed would be necessary for the clinic, so hopefully that’s a sign of good things to come with him. We’re ordering a few more types of medicine and a few other small things, but I think that immediately after the New Year, we’ll be able to open for business. I can’t believe that it’s taken almost a year to get this project done, but we’re finally almost there.

Number two, is the new Peace Corps partnership that Joe is doing to expand a chicken farm and provide training for local farmers who want to learn how to do poultry breeding. As we wait for the last few hundred dollars to accumulate for the project on the Peace Corps web site, Joe has been working with the owner of the farm on marketing and selling his turkeys commercially. He got a few orders for turkeys for Thanksgiving and Christmas from Peace Corps and American Embassy employees in Lomé, but the most exciting thing that’s happened recently is that the he’s had meetings with a couple of large grocery store chains in Lomé for really big turkey orders. For that, he has to get a tax ID number and become a “real” business instead of just a local farm, so he’s looking into that process. He also just had a talk with his first potential paid employee who wants to come work on the expanded farm once the project is fully funded. Ultimately, things are looking promising there, too.

The last big project is the community garden, which we’ve had a lot of problems with the in the last few months. First, the owner of the land we’re renting for the garden apparently neglected to tell his brothers who are partial owners that he was renting the land to us. Hence, he was apparently just pocketing that rent money and not dividing it between all the brothers. Second, the people who are renting the adjacent land and were using the garden part rent-free before we got there, are angry that we “took” the land from them (although they were perfectly happy to buy our lettuce when our neighbor was selling it). Needless to say, this has been frustrating, but the real kicker is that our neighbor’s nephew who was doing most of the weeding and watering went back to school and took his labor with him. Hence, a lot of vegetables died recently. Our neighbor is convinced that the previous users of the land cast some bad gris gris (aka voodoo) on the garden, despite our efforts to convince him that simple watering would have prevented the problem. Either way, our contract for the land is up at the end of the year, and with all the problems we’ve been having, the best thing seems to be to pick up and move the garden to a more hospitable location. The neighbor recently bought some land of his own, and he’s expressed interest in starting a new garden over there, so we’ll see how that goes.

So, that’s all for big things. For little things, Joe recently did a small training project with a farmer on how to grow better corn, which turned out pretty well. On World AIDS Day in December, I went to another volunteer’s village to help her organize a race and some health-themed games for her middle school students. The day was kind of taken over by the local NGO, but it was well done and it was good to see how many right answers the kids gave to the questions about AIDS. Also, I’ve started working with a traditional healer to investigate the possibility of putting the next health volunteer (my replacement) in his village rather than in Tabligbo (Peace Corps would still send a business volunteer to replace Joe here). So far, we’ve had meetings with the chief, village development committee, and a local NGO to talk about their needs; we also found a potential house for the new volunteer. We sent the request off to the Director of the health program, who says they’ll likely make a decision in January or February. Since they haven’t had a volunteer in that village for many years, it’s been kind of fun talking to them over there and having some excitement about the possibility of a local Peace Corps volunteer. While people are always excited to see a yovo, it’s another thing to be excited about working with a yovo, which we’ve had a little difficulty with here.

Like last year about this time, things have been a little slower than usual with the holidays, so I think that’s all to report about work for now. In the absence of interesting work pictures this time around, here are a couple of Joey and me enjoying the things our wonderful friends and family sent us for Christmas. Thank you!