Update 2

hello again! mom keeps asking me to write about what i do here (and i assume she means more than play with little kids in my yard) so i’m going to attempt to explain a bit more about my work.

as i described in my previous post, the organization i was placed with is based about an hour away from my community in the nearest smallish city. it was started 5-6 years ago by the woman who is the coordinator and who has all the decision making responsibility. there is also a president, a secretary, an accountant, a program official and a field official. from what i've gathered, the president and secretary are largely symbolic roles, leaving the work to the coordinator, the accountant (who is actually the coordinator’s brother, hmmmm), and the program and field officials. my counterpart is the field official (meaning that he is the one who i supposedly work closely with in terms of him showing me what i’m supposed to be doing and how to do it, and in terms of me building capacity within the organization). there is another volunteer who was also placed with this organization who lives in the city and works more in the area of organizational development. the organization does work in my community and in a neighborhood right outside the city. the work consists of giving support to orphans and vulnerable children (OVCs), though "support" is a loosely defined term here— what's on paper is very different than what actually happens.

in the community where i live there are five local activistas (volunteers) who make weekly visits to the families where the 33 orphans who we support live. the visits are supposed to serve as a way of giving the orphans and families "psycho-social" support, checking in on whether or not they are going to school, getting enough food, living in sanitary conditions, as well as assessing their needs. the program also includes giving out second hand clothes to our beneficiaries twice a year, school supplies quarterly, getting the kids to the hospital when they are sick, getting them official identification, a vocational training program and recently a house construction project for our beneficiaries most in need. for a lot of reasons, which i’ll go into later, these things haven’t been happening and very little is actually being done in the way of supporting the orphans or their caregivers. two years ago the organization built a chicken coop in the community but only provided enough resources for it to last a few months and it now stands empty. and last year they built a brick oven to make and sell bread in the community but it never functioned because no one has money to buy ingredients.

what i do for the organization on a daily basis mainly consists of overseeing the activistas who make the weekly visits to the orphans. on mondays and wednesdays the activistas do their visits and on thursdays i meet with them to discuss the visits and get feedback. the weekly meetings are always at 14:00 on thursday afternoons. at about that time i spread out a large straw mat under the mango tree in my yard and put out some stools. then i go about my business until the first activista arrives. it’s a good day if the first one arrives by 14:30 and if they are all there by 15:00 we are right on schedule. we have four female activistas and one male: two named isabel, ana maria, luisa and antonio. one of the isabels has an 18-month-old daughter, mariana, who always comes along and i spend a lot of time trying to make friends with her (and then i realize i was just asked a question and am sheepishly lost). although all the women are in their thirties and have lots of kids, antonio is younger, about 18, and still in school (walking three miles every morning to attend class at the nearest secondary school).

every week the activistas hand in their reports detailing their weekly visits and the well-being of the orphans in their care. and every week the reports declare that the orphans are lacking school supplies and clothes and sometimes adequate nutrition. this is where things begin to fall apart. the reports should arguably play an important role in the program because they contain the information, directly from the community, about the situations and needs of our beneficiaries. one would think that these would be instrumental in determining what the program can and should be doing to support our beneficiaries. instead these reports are left forgotten—the office does not even ask for the weekly reports that the activistas fill out and give to me. it doesn’t matter what is written in the reports—the actual purpose of the reports is not for the well-being of the orphans as a means to respond to their needs. at first i was baffled at the insistence from the office that the reports be filled out when nothing seems to happen with them. then i figured out that from the perspective of the office, the reports are a tool that proves to the funder that the visits are happening if the funder should ever audit. they are proof that in the yearly report the program completed X number of home visits. in fact, everything that the office does seems to be aimed at what the funders want, not what our beneficiaries need. (for example, the funders gave us money to buy bikes for the activistas. so the organization did and now gets angry at the activistas when they find out that they are not being used. they aren’t being used in part because they continually fall apart and it’s costly to repair them—it means buying parts in the city and finding someone who knows about bikes to fix them. the other reason they aren’t being used is because the activistas didn’t ask for bikes. the women don’t know how to ride them.)

another problem is that the office rarely makes it out to the community. although there are supposed to be monthly supervisor visits in which the coordinator, program official and field official come out to check in on the activistas and orphans and monitor the quality of the visits, the coordinator has been out to my community only once since i moved here in february. the field official (my counterpart) is supposed to come here twice a week but comes about once every two or three weeks. (at first this was a major source of stress. as my counterpart he’s the person who was supposed to show me the ropes. instead, for my first few weeks here i would wake up in my community every morning, an hour away from the office with nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no one to tell me what i should be doing. looking back, i think this was instrumental in the relationship i now have with my community.) it is unclear whether this is how things have been running all along or if this really began after they placed me in the community, thinking that once i was here they would not need to continue checking in. what makes it a little more complicated is that, as the field official, my counterpart is the main liaison between the community and the office— he should be in the field as much as possible. and as a peace corps volunteer i'm not supposed to be taking the job of a local and instead am supposed to be capacity building. thus, my being the only one at the administrative level in the community is problematic as it has only served to facilitate the lack of direct involvement from the office. it’s hard to imagine how the organization can claim to be working in a community that they are barely in touch with.

from the very beginning my counterpart has always claimed the reason for so rarely showing up in the community is lack of funds— and at first i thought that money simply hadn’t been budgeted in for him or other people from the office to get here (which in itself would be a huge problem—how could the organization forget to budget in that money?). soon after, it became apparent that at least some money was budgeted in for transport to and from the community, it just wasn’t being used for that. additionally, the school supplies and second hand clothes and trainings and sometimes even the small monthly incentives that the activistas are supposed to receive often mysteriously disappear. i made all these discoveries slowly but the big blow came when my counterpart explained to me that he is asked to lie on the quarterly reports he writes that go to the big ngo that funds the project. the reports contain outright lies, which supposedly are backed up by receipts that the coordinator buys—she bought seven bikes to give to the activistas and paid s little extra to get a receipt written out for 10 bikes. apparently she took home the money budgeted for the other three bikes.

i know that the coordinator is stealing money, but what i cannot figure out is if she has good intentions, little knowledge and experience in money management and just takes a little off the top for herself (which would be expected culturally, i’m told). or, if her intentions aren’t in the right place and she does not care as much as she professes about helping our beneficiaries. i recognize that i do not know her story or the reasons why the money disappears, but the situation has been incredibly frustrating. i see our beneficiaries go without school supplies (if they don’t have pens, which they don’t, they are often turned away from class) and i am the one who has to explain to the activistas at our weekly meetings that, still, the organization has not followed through with their promises. i've struggled a lot with how to make the program more substantial. it’s been hard to remain motivated in helping this program or the organization when it’s clear that the coordinator is stealing our funding. it is certainly a disincentive to try to get more funding. it puts me in a difficult position—given the financial struggles that go on in the office i have doubts whether the organization is going to last. i feel that sooner or later the funders will find out that significant amounts of money aren't reaching the beneficiaries and the funding will get cut. (they have been auditing lately and i’ve been hearing rumors from my counterpart that our coordinator is in legal trouble.) by living so far away from the organization and having little contact with it, what i have been able to do is separate myself from it a bit. maybe next time i’ll go into that more and what i’ve been doing outside work. for now i want to tell a success story (so far) about some work i have been able to do in collaboration with my organization.

in addition to the weekly home visits, one of the organization’s activities for last year (2005-2006) was to construct 6 new houses for our 6 families most in need. it never happened and was on the agenda again for this year. though the year-long project started in september (2006), by well into the spring the house construction program had not started. the deal was that the organization would provide all housing materials (cement, roofing, a door, window, and beams) and pay construction workers if the community came together to make the bricks. the only problem was that when the activistas tried to mobilize the community to make the bricks, the community rejected. i live in a community where a significant portion of the households support orphans. there are hundreds here—kids who have lost one or both parents—and there seem to be more and more on a daily basis. my organization supports 33 of them. when the activistas asked the community to come together and work to make bricks to support these families, the community asked "why them? we support orphans too." it is an understandable response, but frustrating all the same. part of me kept thinking why can't they just help? if they help someone else today someone will help them tomorrow. everyone has to contribute. but part of me could also understand: why should they take time out of their day (when they should be going to the field or carting water or making corn flour) to help someone else, when they need that help just as badly? regardless, the community at large was not convinced to come together and make bricks to build houses for our beneficiaries. the project stalled out and unless the families made the bricks themselves (at least 3,000 per household most of which consists of a grandmother and one-three grandchildren), it seemed like a lost opportunity.

meanwhile, since the first week i arrived at site a man in the community, chingolima, has been asking me to help him get uniforms for the soccer team here. there are two men's soccer teams in the area, one in my community and one in the next town over. on weekends they play each other and then have a championship in june. the other town always wins the regular season games and then the championship. the other team also has uniforms and a lot of them have shoes to play in. chingolima, who is somehow affiliated with the soccer team, had been asking me to help out. so when teddy came to visit in june he brought two duffel bags full of old sports jerseys that he had organized from wayneflete and cassie had gotten from nobles. i didn't want to just give the jerseys away and after talking with a pcv friend, we came up with the idea of having the soccer players make bricks in exchange for the jerseys. i proposed the idea to chingolima, we had a couple meetings to arrange the details, and six weeks later the men's soccer team had made about 8,000 bricks to go towards 6 new houses for the orphans. my fear throughout the brickmaking was that after they had all been made the organization would fail to provide the construction materials. partly because our funder has been making recent appearances and checking in on the program, the organization got its act together and brought materials to build the houses. the project has continued and three of the six houses have been completed. following are some pictures of the process.

that’s it for now. hope that gives some insight into my work environment. thanks for reading and more to come soon!