Saturday, December 26, 2009

The route of least resistance


Living has become easier in my little campo just as a new, cold bucketload of woes is dumped on my plate for the New Year. Yes, organizing a community and designing a locally sustained water system is a a bit of a project.


My primary assignment for the next two years is health intervention composed of three parts. First and foremost, I am the resident engineer in charge of the design and supervision of the construction of a small gravity fed water system. Secondly, I shall support and advice a community water committee to organize the system´s creation, the work brigades, the service quota, and the succeeding maintenance, operation, and supervision of the completed water system when I leave. Thirdly, I will organize and train hygeine promoters, a group of women in my community, in proper water usage and storage as well as other sanitary practices to ensure that the potable water that arrives at the house serves to improve the health of the community. Hopefully the project will go above and beyond making for a life more comfortable, relieving the woman and children of the trips taken each day to the rivers and streams to wash and bath and fetch water for cooking and cleaning.


Here and now, moving forward feels like I´m battling against the current. I am thus grateful for the first three month grace period of service dedicated solely to assessing the social and physical situation of the community and opening time to earn the confianza of my new neighbors, friends, and family. But at some points I feel like I´m putting a chainsaw in the hands of machete artists and offering raw pizza dough to Dona´s who cooked the Bandera Dominicana--arroz, habichuela, y carne--before they learned to walk.


For one, organizing the community.


The schedule of the campo is flojo, patterns of work and activity have a steady inconsistency that inhibits scheduling. I´ve felt pretty lucky to have substantial attendance at community meetings but its is frustrating that the attendance is heavily weighted on the women of the house. This is even after I accomodate for men´s work schedules. This wouldn´t be such a grave problem save for the fact that I will depend primarily on men´s labor for the many months of construction needed to complete the pipeline, tanks, spring box and distribution line. It is to the point where I am scheming to plant a circle of chairs in the middle of the pley (the baseball pitch) Sunday afternoon about 2pm just as the weekend game is about to begin, and announcing that they wont swing a bat until we get through this tarea de agua (water work). In terms of work day attendance, thusfar I´ve completed the pipeline survey with an abney level and have the opportunity to meet and work with a majority of the people from each house and have a sense of the challenges with punctuality, the motivation level, and intellect of many of the leaders in the community.


I´ve started with household interviews, each of which I am accompanied by one of 5 well-respected Doña´s in my community. The interviews include questions of family finances, health, domestic water use, as well as the organization of the project. I´m finding it interesting the fluidity and inconsistency of available work for men in the community as opposed to the relative monogonous schedule for the women-mothers of the community who day after day wake up to cook, wash the dishes, clean the house, care for the kids, cook lunch, wash the dishes, fetch water, wash clothes, care for the kids, cook again, organize cosas (things), and go to bed.


And I am finding that the interviews are actually one the best tools as far as educating houses about the project and the local organization of a water committee. I feel squelched at community meetings where no one can keep attention to follow a discussion or the confidence to contribute in a public setting, but in the gallery of each home I have a captive audience and people are prepared to listen and share. I hope slowly that I will appreciate the same level of communication in community meetings because I am certainly not equipped to organize a person at a time. I am awaiting anxiously for water committee elections in January when I feel that I can truly begin to work primarily with a select group of people that the community agrees to charge with the majority of the responsibilities included in as far as representation, organization, and education.


Una nota sobre desarolla


While there are different methods of community development and empowerment, for this type of project, the organization and support of community leaders is the best way to facilitate a successful intervention that continues to survive once the volunteer leaves. As demonstrated in the academic thesis of my Peace Corps technical trainer and as is true in the experience of many other community development projects, the key to the sustainability or the collapse of the local water system is based on the strength of the water committee. Yet in case after case, this key ¨soft¨ intervention fails to receive enough care and enough attention to properly create a permanent social institution. The ¨hard¨ technical aspect of the design, funding, and construction drive the project and are aportioned the majority of the time and energy of the volunteer. Every day I am in my community I feel the pressure to move forward with construction and even after many explanations about my role as an advisor, a teacher, and a helper, I have not broken the notion that I am the ¨jefa¨(boss, chief) of this project. The notion of community ownership is going to demand a great deal of reeducation of the true capacity of the people and families of Las Batatas to take agency of their own well-being and future.


Que mas...


Attempting to wrench local government resources from hands that are unaccustomed to feeding public service projects in poor campos...Trying print and copy papers when the nearby internet center in town rarely has ink and the next nearest center is an hour guagua (imagine a jalopy van filled with 14 people trundling down a washed out road...now imagine Sunday twilight hour and the driver pulling to the side of the road, not once, but three times, to allow front row passengers to buy President beers to share with the driver on the trip home from the city...la libertad Dominicana igual to live free and die young trying). No phone service and the impossibility of planning any activity last minute or arriving anywhere on time (but at the same time nothing starts on time). Planning to work around the fact that there is never silence or peace in the house. Waiting to make real friends.


A good day


So as far as planning for the unexpected, I met an engineer in Puerto Plato on the Malecon at a cafe along the beachwalk the other week. He, a graduate of Carnegie Mellon, along with his son, visiting from the states, and the dog, are enjoying a drink by the shore and watching the kite surfers carve with waves. Toni, notices the papers I am reading at the cafe bar and strikes up a conversation, noticing the Peace Corps emblem. Well, I got his card and he promised he´d try to help.


I took him up on the offer. Today he swung by in his flashy SUV up my little dirt road, navigating around the cows and kids lugging gallons of water, He was all rigged up with a GPS unit to help me cross-check my pipeline survey as well as provide consultance on the design and development of the project.


Incredible


Its like panning for gold


Hours of filtering through dirty sand, empty promises, road blocks, noncommunication, confusion, and then, a nugget. And you´ve struck it rich. Its these little tokens that continue to keep me optimistic and will keep me smiling through these two years.


So I had Toni advice my president on the importance of securing property rights for the pipeline route and Toni gave great tips on equipping my spring box to measure flow rates as well as designing my deposit tank to check inflow rate and consumption flow rate so my community plummers can secure that there are no breaks in the line and that no one illegally taps the line. Its these problems, such as illegal water capture and the greed of surrounding land owners that is a subject I have still yet to internalize and design for. Because such greed, corruption, the social hazard of immorality, runs deep. Even within the community, I know that we can jointly agree on the domestic use of water forbidding the use of system water for pigs and other livestock or crops. But when I take off its a given that the more well-to-do will have their way and use their water the way they wish. All will likely suffer as a result with low water pressure and potentially periods of no water those years where rains don´t arrive for months and months. Success can wash away as easily as sand castles.


Its this lack of, abuse of, usurpation of, public goods-services that is in large part what cripples the majority of people in this country. People work around and live around the discomfort rather than confronting it. Its a point of incredible frustration for a volunteer working from the bottom up, knowing full well that the top is building casinos over the pastures of the poor rather than planting seeds for tomorrow.


Nos vemos si dios quiere...

Thursday, December 17, 2009

I feel like my spanish and my sweat glands are slowly aclimating to la vida Dominicana.

And I'm getting aquainted to the small wonders of campo life...the rats that knaw on the walls at night and sometimes find their way inside your mosquitero!...the excessive amounts of coffee, second suppers and second breakfasts at the ready...every activity happening ¨Dominican time¨, ahorrita, which does not translate to right right now on schedule, but rather, in an hour, or maybe more...bathing in a river every day... hand washing my clothes in a stream bed and then lugging up the 2 gallons of water that I'll need to wash my hands and face the rest of the day.

My Doña's kitchen is always filled lots of kids, lots of yelling, lots of chickens, and and lots of dogs. And the dirt road is not without its cow and donkey road blocks. I aprovechar (take advantage) of the infrequent bouts of luz in the house every other evening that allows for a few hours of entertainment and juice with ice.

And its wonderful.

The nights are filled with the enormous moons and the outlines of palm trees. And endless games of dominoes. Its orange season here in Las Batatas and every time I march off into el monte, the outback, with my ayudantes (volunteers) to survey, check the water system's spring source, or even just visit a neighbor, it is mandatory to go orange picking. My compañero scrambles up the tree to toss down 10 or 20 fruits. I tuck in my shirt and rapidly fill it like a potato sack. Pregnant with oranges, I wabble adelante (forward). We then proceed to peel the fruit and check if it is sweet for eating or sour to squeeze into juice later. If its dulce (sweet), the next kilometer of the hike finds us stumblling, as if drunk, our mouths full of juice, spitting the seeds and tossing the orange peels behind us to mark our route.


Scrambling up orange trees and diving fully clothed into pools of crystal clear spring water, its hard to imagine that its snowing somewhere. But I know that Christmas is approaching because the houses in my little campo have put up colorful lights that twinkle on the nights we are lucky and have electricity. And so I've started sharing traditional carols that I play for people on my computer. And I sing about snow in English.

Miss you, happy holidays.