Update 3

Well, I feel like I’m finally settled back at site after a lot of traveling. It started at the beginning of November when I went home for Alyssa’s wedding. It was a crazy five days at home, a whirlwind of friends and family and wedding festivities. It was so worth it, I can't imagine not having been there. I came back here for a month, of which Liza was here for most of, and her parents Lorni and Jock also came for five days after a trip to Uganda. It was so incredible, as always, to show people from home what life is like here. It was wonderful to have my little house feel so full, and it was a bit of adjustment coming back in January and trying to make it feel like home again. Lize and I left December 5th to travel overland to Maputo before flying home for the holidays. I was at home this second time for about two and a half weeks, again a whirlwind, then back here for a week before going to Maputo for our week-long mid-service conference.

My main project right now is the formation of a women’s center in the community. I spent a lot of the summer designing the project and writing the proposal, and received the grant in October. Things are moving slowly. I’ll start at the beginning and tell you a little bit about what the project is supposed to be. Most of the following is taken from the grant proposal.

The aim of this project is to open a women's center in Amatongas Socel where women will have the opportunity to:

•learn about HIV and AIDS, nutrition, women's reproductive health, and sexually transmitted diseases through a series of health classes

•access the means to improve their nutrition through a chicken coop run by the women that will sell eggs in the community at a below market price and provide chickens to the women who successfully complete the health classes

•partake in small business training and initiatives, which will include access to a sewing machine, brick oven and other small business ideas they may have.

Last spring, as I began to become more comfortable in my community, I became friends with a number of women. Some began to confide in me about health issues and many had questions regarding HIV, women's reproductive health, and sexually transmitted diseases. They have no place in the community to get good health information. Simply by speaking with them and sharing my health knowledge, I have been providing an important service to these women. Additionally, upon arriving here I noticed that people, especially children, suffer from lack of nutrition, specifically from lack of protein. This was obvious to me from both looking around at the people and from living here and getting to know their way of life—and realizing that people do not or cannot include sufficient protein in their daily diets. This was confirmed in speaking with a nutritionist at a nearby mission that serves babies in the community, who told me that the biggest nutritional problem she sees in the area is lack of protein.

The project I’m working on now has been designed—with the help of women in the community and based on another project done by a Peace Corps Volunteer—to address the issues I have just mentioned: lack of health knowledge in the community, lack of nutrition (specifically protein) in the local diet, and to reduce transactional sex (due to lack of income generation options for women). (Transactional sex is not limited to what we commonly think of as prostitution—it can be very informal, whereby a woman acts more as a girlfriend or sex partner in exchange for material goods, such as food or clothes, etc…. Although sex work is probably not too common in my community, informal exchanges between men and women involving sexual acts are most likely very common.) The objective of this project is HIV prevention through empowering women and building confidence. The goal is not only to give the women knowledge, but to provide them with the means to use this knowledge to benefit their lives. The women's center will provide a safe space where women in the community can access knowledge about health (HIV prevention, nutrition, and reproductive health) and where they have access to the means to be able to change their nutritional and financial situations (through the chicken coop and small business initiatives). The aim of the chicken coop is twofold: to produce eggs in the community that will be sold at a below market value so that the families who live here will be able to purchase them; and to raise chickens that will be given to the women upon completion of the health class as an incentive to participate. Lastly, by providing options for income generation through a small business training and skill building, they will be less likely to turn to transactional sex. The intended long term impact is the formation of a strong women’s association in the community with HIV and AIDS and other health knowledge that will be transmitted to the larger community. While the immediate beneficiaries will be the women participants, the community at large will indirectly benefit in a number of ways such as through the women’s positive preventative behavior change and increased nutrition in families.

During the first year I will work closely with the women in organizing and managing the project. The initial stage will last eight months with the expectation that the project will be completely transferred to the women in the community within a year. At that point the project will be self-sustainable, earning enough income from the chicken coop and small business initiatives to cover the expenses generated by the health classes and small business training.

So, where are we now?

If you look at the Project Action Plan that I included with the proposal, by now (month 3 of the project), we should be finished with the construction of the center and the renovation of the chicken coop and into the first session of the health classes. Ahh. I would say we are almost a third of the way through the construction of the center. Which is a great source of stress in my life, but I tell myself over and over that these things are out of my control, I have to continually let go of my own ideas of work and things getting done. Things just come up. Things that are beyond anyone’s control, that are a product of this world and the way it is. It is frustrating and I get discouraged by a lot—from wood not being available at the price we budgeted, or at all, and the head construction worker not being able to give accurate estimates on quantities we’ll need; to having a conversation with women in the community who talk about how common it is for women to give their young daughters or sisters to men to sleep with in exchange for money because they need the money and don’t want to do it themselves; to myths in the community that condoms transmit HIV. Sometimes it seems like this is too big a battle to fight.

One day last week I was all set to get a lot done. I had an 8:00 meeting with Suzana and the builders to go over some problems that we’ve been having. A lot of the bricks that were made (locally) for the project have been breaking because they weren’t thoroughly baked (possibly because it rained when they were being made and possibly because they just weren’t baked properly). We’ve arranged a trade with a member of the community who happens to have a bunch of already-made bricks—we’ll use his bricks now and when the rainy season ends we’ll have bricks made to replace them. Also on the agenda: the procurement of bamboo to start renovating the chicken coop and procurement of wood to proceed with the classroom. Suzana and I made it to the work site by 8:00, shortly after which it started to downpour. We waited in the chicken coop for almost an hour, huddled together on a log in the middle to simultaneously avoid getting wet and getting bitten by red ants, when we decided that no one was going to show up with the rain. No one did.

Secondly, I had a meeting scheduled that same day for 9:00am in which the coordinator of the organization I was placed with was going to come and talk with the activistas in our program about why things fell apart last year and what her plans are for 2008. It took me a couple hours to walk through the community the day before to inform each of the activistas about the meeting. However, because of the rain she did not show up, which shouldn’t have surprised me because it would have only been her third time making the trek from the city (an hour away) during the whole year I’ve lived here.

So I didn’t get anything done. And instead spent most of the day feeling thoroughly discouraged about development, what I’m doing here, the creeping realization that it’s not all that likely I will leave here feeling like anything has been accomplished. I made rice pudding and pumpkin soup and flossed my teeth and read. The thought passed through my mind as I was reading Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope, that I am accomplishing something because I’m educating myself and therefore being a good world citizen. It was a stretch.

In addition to the frustrations of a slow moving project and the difficulties of getting adjusted to life here after spending a lot of time with friends and family, some difficult things have happened this past week. Over the weekend one of my neighbors died of cholera and late last week another woman in the community, one of the beneficiaries of our house construction project last summer, also died of cholera. In addition, my cat Cotamba died last weekend. It’s strange to see how death is dealt with in another culture, and even stranger right beside my own way of dealing with it.

Late yesterday I had a long conversation with Suzana in which I confessed to her all that I’ve been feeling in terms of not getting anything done here. She pointed out some of the smaller things I’ve done, such as teaching her how to make popcorn, and the conversation ended with us in hysterics over the thought of me returning home and people saying, “Wow, so you’ve been in Africa for two years? What did you do there?” And me responding, “Well, I taught one of my neighbors to make popcorn.” Later in the evening I had a mini dance party on my verandah with all my favorite neighborhood kids. I realized that they were imitating my every move, a strange thought given they are gifted with rhythm that I just don’t have. A combination of feeling like I was butchering my own dance moves and watching better versions of myself dance. But, amongst a lot of hard hard things, it left me in wonder at the redeeming qualities of this experience, and how happy I am to be here.