risky business

I've never really thought of myself as an overly cautious person. I suppose I was raised in a family where one is taught to approach life with caution in mind, and I have parents (or at least a mother) who ranks somewhere between very cautious and over-protective on the SPFC (Scale of Parental Figure Cautionality). But still, I was a gymnast, that requires some risk taking, right? It's not a full contact sport, but it's dangerous enough. I like to climb tall things and jump off of stuff and so on and so forth, which I think in many people's minds constitues as taking a risk. But being a volunteer requires taking the kind of risk that I'm not accustomed to taking. It requires trying to pioneer programs, or teach people things with an extremely low expectancy of success and sustainability. I guess the nature of any risk is that there's a good chance of failure. Or maybe it's just that if you do happen to fail, the result would be disaster. In any case, the risks I now have to force myself to take in order to have any level of success in helping my village are not risks I'm used to having to take. The type of risk I have to take is trusting myself to be doing things that will sustainably help my community. There is no one here with me; no one to monitor me, or tell me if I'm doing things right. I have to put complete trust in myself and in my technical knowledge whatever that is, without anyone to check me if I mess up. And the hardest thing is that if I want to get anything done at all, the only way to do it is to jump in head first. No hesitations. Nobody is going to tell me what projects to do, and nobody but myself is going to get them going. It doesn't really matter if I'm not fully confident before I start that it'll turn out with the results I want, I have to do it anyway. And that's what makes it the riskiest business I have ever engaged in. I felt like I was taking a big risk last week in this way, when I held my first technical training session with people in my village (except for how to make enriched pooridge, which is just like a cooking/nutrition lesson). It was on how to make an "improved cookstove", "foyer ameliore", or "ragande", in english, french, and moore respectively. Normally, in any village courtyard, food is cooked by lighting a fire under a pot which rests on three big rocks. This makes it very hard to control the temperature of the pot, and it also wastes a lot of wood because much of the heat escapes from the open fire. The point of the mud stove is that it makes wood burning way more efficient, by surrounding the pot on all sides, not letting as much heat escape, and thus saving the women a lot of time spent looking for wood, or money spent buying it. It also protects the food better than the normal way of cooking just over an open fire, and it makes it impossible for the pot to turn over. If you want more detailed information on how to make them, or why they are important, see Gwen's blog about it from our training at: http://gwendolyninfaroffplaces.blogspot.com/2008/12/mud-stoves.html.
When I did needs assessments during my first couple months at site, one of the things the women said was that there's never enough wood to cook with, and that it takes up way too much of their time to have to go searching for it. So naturally, the first thing that came to mind, was that mud stoves would be an excellent, free, and sustainable way to ameliorate this problem, which is why I decided to hold the training session on how to make them. It took me a while to get to the point where I was comfortable doing it though. I had been trained on how to make the stove, but I had only done it once before, and it had been way back in November, so I wasn't sure if I remembered exactly how to do it. It's not an extremely complicated process, but it's very specific, and certainly not innate, and I had a lot of fears about making mistakes, and having it not turn out right. I had a handout explaining it, but even with that, I wasn't fully confident that it would turn out right, or that I could express the technicalities of making the stove in french and moore. In short, I knew I wanted to do the training, but I was really nervous about getting it started. I didn't know how I was going to go about getting all the materials I needed, who would help me do the training in Moore, or even how I would find a group of women interested in taking time out of their day to participate. But as soon as I decided that the only way things were ever going to get done was if I lost the fear of failure and just did it anyway, everything seemed to fall into place. It was much easier than I thought it would be to find an interested group of women and to gather all the materials.

I stopped by the courtyard of one of the women who helps me make enriched pooridge every friday, Ramata (in the yellow shirt in the picture to the left), and I told her I wanted to make a foyer ameliore at the CSPS to make things easier for her when she makes the bouillie. Also, having a foyer at the CSPS is a good example for evreyone who passes by to see how it works and why they should build one in their own courtyard. She was immediately on board, and told me that she wanted one in her own courtyard too. I said, good, then you can help me organize a training session on how to make one! Ramata is one of two women in my village that I know speaks enough french to help me translate into moore, so I decided that I would teach her how to make one first and do it at the CSPS, and then we could hold the training session together in her courtyard. This way, she would have already made a foyer, and could help me to explain it to those who would attend the training session. I asked her if she could find a group of about 10 women that would like to learn how to make the stove, and told her what materials I needed them to gather before the training session would take place. She happily obliged to find the group to train, and we chose a date for the training. It's actually a two part training; in the first part, the women learn to make the banco, or the mud mixture specific to building the stoves, and once the banco has time to dry, the actual construction of the stoves takes place a week later. So I showed Ramata how to make the banco last thursday, and then we held the first of the trainings last tuesday with a group of 12 women.

They were all really excited and I think they especially enjoyed watching me get dirty as I helped them mix the mud and stomp all over it. Ramata and I then made the mud stove at the CSPS last thursday, and a bunch of other women ended up stopping by to help us out which was nice. It turned out...ok...maybe a bit lopsided, and it started to rain when we weren't quite finished so we really had to rush at the end, but I think it's going to be functional so that's all that matters. Somehow every single person in the village seems to have found out that I am doing this mud stove training, and now every woman I see says, "when are you going to come show me how to do it!?" I'm really glad that everyone is so excited about the mud stoves because it's something that doesn't cost any money, and the time it takes to make one is absolutely worth the time and money it will save people in the long run. I guess the point is that if I am hesitant to get a project going, I just have to remember that it's always worth risking that things will not end up exactly how I imagine them, because if I hesitate to start projects, or never start them at all because of fear of failure, that would be an even bigger failure than not trying at all.

In terms of other work I'm doing currently, I started a savings and credit club with a group of women. There are 14 women in the group, and each week, each of them will put 25 cfa (5 cents) into a box. Right now 25 cfa per week is all people can afford to put in, but hopefully after the rainy season when there's a bit more money, we can up it to 50 cfa. Eventually, the money will add up, and the women can start taking out loans from the group. For example, if one of them wants to start a small enterprise of sorts, like making soap and selling it, she can go to the group and ask for a loan of how ever much she needs to buy the materials. She then has a certain period of time (this group decided on a month) to pay the money back to the group after she has made money off of her soap. My group decided that any time money is borrowed from the group, it will have to be for some sort of income generating activity, so that they'll be able to pay the money back, with the exception of someone needing money for a medical emergency. They voted on the President, Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer, Guardian of the Box (no one wanted to do this because no one wanted to be responsible for the money), and Guardian of the Key (separate from guardian of the box so that the guardian of the box can't open it). I think the women, who haven't ever been a part of an official type group or club, are really getting a kick out of having meetings and participating with their roles.

This week was also a polio vaccination campaign, where every single kid 0-5 in the village has to be vaccinated, so you have to go around to every single quartier and make sure everyone gets the vaccine. As each kid gets vaccinated, you mark their finger with a very very permanent marker which is now all over my own hands because of the insane squirming they do to avoid said marker because apparently markers are scary. The vaccine isn't a shot, which is nice; it's two drops in the mouth of every kid, so that makes it a bit easier to vaccinate all the kids. During the campaign, you have to start at 4:30 AM every day though because by 8 AM it starts to get way too hot for the vaccine to stay cold even in the coolers we carry around, plus people start going to the fields and then you miss kids. It's supposed to be only for kids up to 5 years, as I said, but since no one really knows their age, this is pretty flexible. Let's just say there are some pretty giant "4" year olds, some as tall as me, in my village.

Last night was a big tam tam fete in my village. It's a big traditional dance that basically passes throughout the village and picks people up as it goes along. People playing the tam tams are in the back of the growing lines of people all doing the dance which can best be explained as bobbing their heads and waving a piece of cloth in front of them in their rows. The rows grow and grow as more people join. I still don't really know the reason for it, or why it happened yesterday, but in any case, it was a good time. I took some videos of it which maybe I'll try to post next time I go to ouaga.

In any case, here's one random picture from my courtyard this week (my time is rapidly running out otherwise I'd add more). This is Sapoca, age 4