Recent work and thoughts on development:

                Good news! I’ve been so incredibly busy lately, which any Peace Corps volunteer will tell you, is a real gift. I’ll detail my projects in a bit, but for now, let me just say that creating sustainable change is really really hard in practice. We talked our ears off about how to make our projects sustainable during training. The last thing we want is to be that development organization that comes in, spends a lot of resources, pats themselves on the back, and then leaves the community in the same place (or worse off) than they found it. This concept seems obvious, and it’s hard to find a decent NGO that doesn’t have the word “sustainable” somewhere in its mission statement.

                But now that I’m in the meat of it, actually trying to get projects going on the ground.... there are so many roadblocks that get in the way of this goal. For example, we talked a lot during training about teaching basic entrepreneurship and business management skills alongside trainings on how to make soap or transform food. This is crucial for sustainability because while women might now know how to make soap or tomato powder, they might not be able to sell it successfully without basic marketing and price setting skills.  But the Senegalese people (especially women) have very little time on their hands to dedicate to my trainings. One of my biggest mistakes in the past couple months of starting work, has been making the assumption that if I’m invited to a women’s group meeting to teach how to make soap, the women would have the time to stick around and listen to me give a lesson on marketing to go with it. They have to get back home to make dinner and take care of the children.

                Another crucial element to sustainability is continuous participation in a project. I’ve learned more than ever in the last couple months, that projects that meet regularly – every Tuesday for example -  are so much more beneficial than single day trainings. This seems obvious (partially for that same reason – teaching business skills alongside hard skills is crucial), but it’s really been glaring me in the face lately, as I’ve realized how difficult it is to get these long-term projects off the ground. Often, it’s not the same people that show up to a meeting week after week. I recently started a computer literacy class at the high school for example, and I naïvely thought that the same group of kids that showed up the first week would show up the next. On the second week (with material that I’d prepared to build on the first week), only 2 of the original kids showed up, and the rest were new. Additionally, continuous meetings are good for reviewing content taught. Just like classes in America, people forget things. I did a single-day training last week on how to pickle carrots and make onion powder, and I worry that the women (who don’t know how to read and write) will forget the recipe that I made them repeat about 100 times.

                And then of course, there’s the obvious restraint to sustainability: lack of money. I worry about my computer classes because once I leave, who will teach them? I’ve thought a lot about starting a real computer class program before I leave - getting the school to incorporate computer classes into its regular curriculum. But that kind of thing would require money – the ability to hire an extra teacher, probably more computers (we only have 12, which is a LOT for any school in the Fouta), etc.  It’s also really easy for well-thought out sustainable projects to fall flat because of a mistake, and the lack of money to correct it. My ancien’s (the volunteer before me) chicken coop project in the next town over for example, ran into trouble when have of their chickens from the first batch died because they hadn’t anticipated such extreme heat. They had been counting on the profit from those chickens to buy new chicks, and invest more in the business. They were barely able to scrape by (at a much slower pace), but if all of the chickens had died, they would have been entirely stuck.

                So anyway, I’ve been thinking about sustainability a lot lately, and struggling my way through it. I’m still in the phase of service when I’m just overjoyed if anyone shows up to my trainings in the first place. They aren’t kidding when they say you start your real projects your second year. The first year is all about learning. And wow, am I learning. I’m learning so many small nuanced things about development, that I don’t think I could fully grasp without experiencing it myself.

Here are some brief descriptions of the things I’ve been working on lately:

Chicken coop: I recently submitted a grant request to basically copy the chicken coop project my ancien did. My best friend at site Ablye, is incredibly motivated and already had a business plan written up for his chicken coop. We’ve got a group of 24 people who have all agreed to contribute about $10 (adding up to 10% of the grant request as required) as well as various materials and their labor in taking care of the chicks. If the grant is accepted, we’ll build the coop around mid-December, and start raising chickens in 45-day cycles starting around January. I’ll be doing several different trainings on business management to help them through it.

Parboiled Rice: I think I already wrote about this training I did back in September. Over the course of 4 days, my friend Fati trained 30 women how to make parboiled rice (a healthier way of processing the rice grown here). I taught basic marketing and price setting strategy as well. Now, Fati is interested in starting a co-op project in which all of the women’s groups in her federation share one common pool of rice, which they can transform into parboiled rice for a commission. Any additional profit would be put back into the federation to fund future development trainings. Of course, we need funding for this type of project… but I’m really into it, so hopefully it’ll happen down the line.

Food transformation: I’m just getting started in this, but I’ve done 2 trainings on how to make a simple solar dryer for drying vegetables and making powder. This will be especially useful when tomato season comes (early January!!). I also recently taught how to pickle things (we’ll see if they like the way it tastes…), and despite not having any actual tomatoes, how to jar them. I’m also hoping to try out this weird trick I read about online where apparently you can use wood ash to preserve whole tomatoes for months. As you can probably tell, the overabundance of tomatoes and lack of preservation techniques is a huge problem for Fanaye.

Trash collection: The town about 5k away, which is much smaller than Fanaye Diery expressed interest in starting a trash collection project, which basically made me want to jump and down. It’ll be a long time coming, but the first task I gave them, was to conduct a feasibility study – basically visit every house, inform them about the importance of trash collection, and ask how much they’d be willing to pay for a pick-up service. After that, we’ll talk more about the structure of the project – how many horse carts we’ll need, how often they’ll collect it, how much they’ll be paid, etc.

Computer classes: These have been taking up the bulk of my time lately. Help with computer literacy is probably the number one thing I get asked for here. So I decided to start a class for high school students every Tuesday. But then, of course, because a lot of adults were asking too, I had to add an adult class on Mondays…. And my MSS scholarship girls were so excited about computers, so now we’re doing a class on Wednesdays. It’s starting to look like I’m the new computer professor of Fanaye. But hey, if that’s what they want most, I’m happy to focus my energy on this. It’s been a real learning curve learning how to teach these classes. Everybody’s at a different level, and you really have to put yourself in the shoes of someone who has never touched a computer before. There’s all sorts of things that those of use fortunate enough to have used them since we were kids don’t realize aren’t intuitive –  for example, double clicking and highlighting are incredibly challenging for most of my students.

New “Monitoring Reporting and Evaluation Coordinator” for the Gender and Development Committee! :  I’m super excited about this…. Last week I went to Thies (the Peace Corps training center) for the gender committee meeting. I’ll be a part of the 2018 board, and in charge of all things data. Collecting data on the success of gender-oriented projects by other volunteers, figuring out where the gaps are in promoting gender-oriented projects, being the point person for how to report your gender projects on the “VRF” (Peace corps reporting system). Plus I’ll also be the point person for gender committee grant applications (and part of the team to approve them), and I’ll be in charge of writing the grant for the MSS Scholarship project. I’m a dork about this stuff, so I’m jazzed about the work….. but honestly, even more so right now, I’m just excited to be able see so many of my Peace Corps friends at the 4 meetings back in Thies.