Reflections for 2012

I have now been back at site now for a month and I have had the chance to reflect a lot on the last year and on the year to come.  It is particularly interesting to compare where I was last year at this time to where I am now.  Last year at this time, I was like a chicken with its head cut off.  I was running around aimlessly wondering what in the world I was going to do with myself.  I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do, what I was capable of doing, and what could actually be done, but getting these to merge was perplexing me.  I was thrust into the world of development with only a few months of experience behind me and a handful of influential books and articles that had inspired me to follow the path I had.  In hindsight, I managed pretty well…I am still here after all.

This year is vastly different.  I can safely say that I have found my place here.  The path is clear and I am fully motivated to take it.  I now have enough work to keep me busy to the end of my service in October.  At times I wonder if I am now biting off more than I can chew.  But I am embracing the work which is already proving to be much more stimulating than last year.

My work continues with the Tulongeni garden.  The challenge there of course is getting vegetables to grow and keeping the women motivated about the project.  The easy part was getting the money to build the garden; the hard part is getting it to succeed.  I have read a handful of books and listened to a number of podcasts that pessimistically assess the situation in Africa.  After all of these years of aid, the continent is still the same, if not worse.  Failed projects funded by donor organizations are scattered all across the land, and this is even visible in Namibia.  I do not want this project to join this group.  Needless to say, a lot of my energy will be directed here in 2012.

A separate group of women have decided to begin their own garden near the much larger Tulongeni garden.  This garden I am excited about.  After they came to me looking for help to build a fence, I told them that they would have to wait until February before I could begin working on a grant for them.  This did not deter them.  They built their own fence using sticks and palm branches, made compost, and have now begun planting.   Their motivation has been inspiring.  I now know that this is how projects need to start – without me.  Very soon I will begin working more with them to develop a plan for a garden which I am hoping will include a way to collect rainwater for irrigation.  I will write grants that will be submitted to the US Embassy and the Ministry of Gender Equality and Child Welfare and with some luck one of them will want to support the project.  But again, we face the same challenges as the other garden.  But with their overwhelming enthusiasm I am confident that they can make something happen.

Yet again, another group of women (are you seeing the theme?) came to me looking for help with their pig project.  These women were very clever in that they knew the time was now to start a project while I was around.  And knowing that I couldn’t do much for them without something already going, they found land, they gathered pigs, built a pen out of palm branches, and started their own pig project out of scratch.  Their knowledge of pig raising is limited to the local basics but they are fully aware of the economic feasibility of doing so.  I know even less about raising pigs, but luckily I have this invaluable tool known as the internet.  It has been a joy researching about small-scale pig farming and passing this information on to the women.  We are now in the process of developing grants that will be submitted to the same organizations so that they can formalize the project and get proper housing that the pigs desperately need.   It is work like this that I have embraced and am really enjoying.  I am still on the fence when it comes to pumping money into projects but I am finding that I thoroughly enjoy going through the entire grant writing process.  Developing the project, researching information, obtaining quotations, creating a budget, and finally writing the grant itself has been very stimulating.

A fairly new project that is beginning to gain traction is the constructions of a biogas digester at the school.  I recently met a fellow American here on a Fulbright Scholarship who is teaching a class at the local university in town on renewable energies.  Anna has experience with these biogas digesters that produce a burnable gas from cow manure and produce a lot of good compost.  I expressed to her that Enguwantale could be the perfect candidate for the installation of one of these.  The school has a feeding program that is supposed to feed around 100 kids each day.  However, there is a firewood issue since there are few trees in the area.  The program is very sporadic and the maize meal that the school receives gets piled up in a classroom where it either rots or is given out to the learners at the end of the school year.  It is our hope that this digester will alleviate this problem.  Plus, the digester produces a lot of compost which will be highly demanded by the gardens. We are now in the process of designing the digester and will soon put some letters in the mail looking for some financial support.

My baby for the coming months is going to be the development of a cooperative training course that later in the year I hope to give a full workshop on to the various groups I am working with.  It will cover things like cooperative principles, the formulation of by-laws, member management, and financial management.  It is a fitting time to be developing this since 2012 has been declared the International Year of Cooperatives (go figure).   I see cooperatives as being a very effective way for small rural income generating projects to be organized.  I have been struggling with finding good ways in which to organize these various groups of women.  I have spent hours on the internet pulling resources that I hoped would give me guidance on how to form a cooperative.  However, much of what I have found is cumbersome and difficult to apply in these various situations.  So, I have been working on taking all this information from various organizations like USAID, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and various Ministries of Agriculture, along with my own tweaking, to come up with a resource that is hopefully more applicable in an informal rural setting.  My hope is that it can be something that future Peace Corps volunteers can use in this country.

And finally, there is school.  In line with last year, I feel like a chicken with its head cut off when it comes to school.  I am not a teacher by trade, so I struggle.  I enjoy being around the kids and am comfortable with them in the classroom, but I am not meant to be a teacher.  The problems that the entrepreneurship curriculum faces are well beyond anything I can handle.  For 2011, 14% of the grade 10 learners received a D or above.  In fact, only 3 passed; 2 with Ds and one with a C.  I understand the curriculum just fine but trying to convey this information to learners with English as their second language is daunting.  This is work for someone who has years of teaching behind them.  I am really at a loss and without the cooperation of the current entrepreneurship teacher who is unmotivated, I give this aspect of my service little to no hope.  However, I have an active entrepreneurship club where we run a school store, try to grow vegetables, and run a photo project.  There is potential for us to make a good income so my goal is to make enough money to take them on a small field trip somewhere in Namibia.

That was a lot of reflecting.  People often ask me what I am up to and what projects I have going on so I thought this to be a fitting update. 

I will keep you posted on the good or bad of how these projects unfold.  Maybe I will even include some pictures to make it not so boring…