Monday, January 5, 2015

My feet is my only carriage, so I gotta push on through


So for the past few days I’ve been feeling like a total failure. I have to keep constantly reminding myself that I have 19 more months to go and I’ll figure it out soon and things will all fall into place. I feel like the hardest thing about Peace Corps is turning the visions we have for our communities into realities. Your community comes to you with a problem. You think of a solution. Then you need to figure out how to make it into a reality. Find the money. Find the time. Find the people who will carry it on after you leave. It’s all very daunting.

 

And sometimes I feel like I haven’t intergrated well. That I haven’t made an impact on my community and I’ll just be like another volunteer who’s come and went. Which in most regards is a normal thing. I think of peace corps volunteers like a random breeze on a sail. No one notices them, but they turn the ship to a different, better direction and then they are gone. And there is no record of them there. But a big part of peace corps is making connections with host country nationals so that they trust you and will go with you with these crazy ideas you have. And I’ve been worried that everythings moving so slowly partly because I’ve been super crappy at integrating. Which I’m not sure I’ve actually been bad at integrating….I could just be over thinking like I’m wont to do.

 

 

Anyway….I’m telling you all of these because of an experience I had just now walking to the market. My path to the market takes me through my neighbor’s backyard, past her pit latrine, through a field, through another backyard, through a football pitch, down the road, and then across the street. So I get to see a fair amount of my community when I go through. This time, as I went through the first back yard, one neighbor called out to me, “May I escort you?” Of course I said yes, and I was delighted to walk with someone new. We walked through the field and into the first backyard. As usual, around a dozen children came out of the wood work shrieking “Nagudi! How are you?!” They grabbed my hands and welcomed me through their yard and escorted us through the football field. Totally normal walk to the market. They shout “Nagudi” because I was annoyed at being called Muzungu in my own neighborhood, so I introduced myself to them. Nagudi is my African name. Anyway, the woman that I was walking with turned to me and said “The children like you. You know all of them. You are a good person with a good heart. You have good manners. You are good to the children and the adults that you meet. You have a good heart.” It was like the universe knew I needed a confidence boost today. It felt great! And about two seconds later, you know, just so I don’t get too cocky, the woman says to me, “ Ah Nagudi, but what are you eating? You are becoming fat!” Fat is actually a good thing here. And for the record, I’ve lost 18 lbs since I’ve been here. BOOM!

 

I wanna see ya be brave!


Hey Folks,

 

I haven't been writing because I haven't had anything interesting to tell you. It's either horribly depressing or comes off as “I am warm and you are cold  *sung to the tune of the eskimo from boy meet world* And even now I'm considering stopping because my new kitten won't stop sitting on the keyboard. Her name's Arwen and she's super cute. Except when she LICKS my face all night and I can't sleep. Cat kisses sound cute in theory but the scratchy tongue is just the worst. Also fish breath. Gross. I've been a little lonely lately, and Arwen is nice to come home to. *** edit Arwen is actually a dude and I thinking of naming him Lucic. LOOOOOOCH. *******edit decided to name cat, Goose. He’s so SO WERID.

 

Anyway, development—true development-- is so slow it's painful. Any project I want to start has to go through the planning stages, the convincing stages, the money stages, and the building stages. I'm almost positive I'll have to extend my service to accomplish anything I want to do. Sorry mom and dad.

 

Here's a break down of what I'm working on:

 

My first project that I'm super excited about and my organization is too is a cloth diaper project for the home. It'd be easy to just call up a good intentioned organization to do a diaper drop, but what happens when those run out? What happens when the company will no longer donate diapers? This babies' home has been around since 1968 so it's safe to say that it will continue one for years and years to come. It'll outlive any goodnatured individual's new year's resolution, any resume building mission trip, any mid-life crisis, or what ever else posses people to volunteer for a few weeks. So donating nappies is at best a temporary fix. I chose to help the mothers create a cloth diaper project because they already have a room full of sewing machines and caregivers who want to know how to sew. However, pricing out the materials and writing the start-up grant has proven to be a time suck. And with the holidays coming it's even more difficult to get everyone to together to plan. I was searching for a way to get a major company to donate material, but I realized that that is not sustainable either. Will the company donate forever? Will the suit with a heart that I've found always be working for the fabric company? What happens if they decide not to give us the free fabric? So now I'm on the hunt for a cheap fabric supplier in Uganda. But when you say fabric, they steer you towards the indian fabric markets in Mbale. The places with the silks for gomes and cotton kyitengue for dresses. I'm looking for nylon. Tough, umbrella quality, nylon. And I'm looking for it in rolls. For my prototype I just destroyed an umbrella. That's not cost effective in the long run. Also, Uganda in the world of estimation. To budget out this project I need exact numbers of yardage or meters of elastics and fabric. Exact numbers of what goes into making one diaper. Every time I try to get these numbers, the word “somehow” comes into the mix and I want to tear my hair out. Just keep swimming.

 

My next project is something the home has been asking for. It's sort of a “prove myself” project. I need to prove to the people working here that I'm not like the short term volunteers who come through, cuddle babies, and leave. I need to show them that I listen to their wants and needs and I'm working with them not for them and not telling them what to do. This project is the chicken coop that many of you have seen me chat about on facebook. The chicken coop is going to be a real game changer for this community. The babies home relies on donations from parents of the children and from goodnatrued souls through uganda and the rest of the world. Now, if you come here, they seem to be doing well. However, what if people can't donate one year? Living off the generosity of other, as any waitress will tell you, is always a gamble. And you cannot afford to gamble with the lives of children at stake. The chicken coop will allow the babies home to become completely self sustainable. To have money to provide for children for always.

 

Now, you might say that between the nappies and the chickens, how are these people going to have time to do all this work and watch the children. Well, that's what i've beeen thinking too. I've researched and found a babies home in Tanzania that invites relatives (older sisters, aunts, grandmothers, etc) to come and stay at the home. These women (because lets face it, women are the only ones who do anything in the developing world) come and learn how to properly take care of these children. I've gone on several resettlement visits and seen that some families can really take care of the their children once they come home. And some cannot. There's this one little girl who's face still haunts me, as cliché as that sounds. I can't pronounce her name, but I see her whenever we talk about children who have falling through the cracks. My counterpart says that one thing that we could really do to help these families is to give them an income generating activity. Eureka! Viola! It all comes together like a play or an after school special. The families send a representative to live at St. Kizito for one month. During that month they bond with their specific child, learn to cook nutritious meals, garden, prevent malaria, and keep hygienic conditions. They can also work in the chicken coop to learn chicken farming and work in the diaper IGA to learn to sew. A short term group also came and built an oven. They can learn to bake as well. And if I can swing it, we can make clay beads and they can learn to make and sell those. It's also a great opportunity for a village savings and loan. I've also had to go even slower to convince the people I work with that it's a good idea. Normally, after the host country nationals veto a project, it's dead. If they don't like it, they won't continue on with it after you leave so it's just a waste of time. However, I can't think of a better way that accomplishes all the problems they keep coming to me with. So baby steps. We'll do a dry run of this in August 2015 and if it works out we'll do another one in November 2015.

 

And the start up money for all of this can start with Peace Corps grants, but I'll need to find another institution to fund the health classes and the IGA classes after I leave. The Peace Corps grants leave when I do. I'm thinking Bill Gates but that might be thinking too big. We'll find it though, where there's a will, there's a way!

 

 

So that's what I've been doing—-as boring as it is!