Thursday, March 11, 2010

Playing in Cement

I really should have done an update here long ago, but, well, I have been in my village pretty continuously, with short, non-computer filled stints into cities. The village is a bad place to hang out if you want to update people on your life, write a blog entry or things like that. But as it turns out, it seems to be a pretty good place for going and getting some work done. Go figure.
Ok, so the latrines are going. They are taking slightly longer than I had expected, but honestly we have had hardly a wasted day. As of the current tally, this the 11th of March, forty-two families have fully contribted to the project and another two have given a good chunk. While I am hoping, nagging, enouraging, doing everything I can think of to have the full fifty familes involved in the project and finishing next month with a latrine, there are a few that have all but come out and said they arent or cant participate with the rest of the village.

One is one of the Pulaar families, most of the children and the family have already moved to the city, the father I hardly ever see even going over to his house several times in a week. According to the neighbors he is thinking of moving himself and has changed his mind and doesnt want to invest in a latrine.

Another is a very small family, the rest of the grown children or relations have apparently moved away. So it is just a middle aged guy and his wife and three small kids. He says he cant afford the contribution portion. Additionally the neighbors who might be inclined to help, say his house is one some really hard ground and besides the few of them could just as easily use a neighbors latrine.

One last guy just hasnt seemed very into the project from the get-go. He has an average sized family but didnt really see the point of a latrine, despite my best convincing until his surrounding neighbors, some his brothers, joined in the project. Now he is saying he will contribute as soon as he gets the money, but he hasnt made a move to dig a pit either.

But then, even with these three, I am fairly certain that we can get the other forty-seven done. And if once we are done with them and certain that the other three are not getting on board, we can consider other nearby families, up and coming heads of households and all that. But all that is politics. Really what I have been doing the past several weeks is playing in cement.

If you havent seen them, I have been taking pictures of our progress. Two days ago, we "finished" our twenty-fourth latrine. I say "finished" because they are not actually usable yet, they still need the pipe that leads to your toilet, a small but in fact critical piece. I have asked the masons why they havent finished them up thusly and they tell me that it will go so quickly that they might as well wait and do a whole area of them at once so they dont have to repeatedly go back and forth for such things in different parts of the village. That does sound resonable i guess, but means that a latrine might not be usable until next week at the earliest, where the first swath of the village should get all of its completed latrines- the ten houses furthest to the west.

I need to go and put captions on all those pictures, but basically how we have been doing it is that the brickmaker comes in and makes four or four and a half sacks of cement worth of bricks. He can usually do two or three houses worth in a day. Then after a few days to let them dry the masons come and brick up the pit all morning till lunch time. Then they go to latrine that they bricked up the previous day and prepare and cement the lid for it. Its a pretty cool thing. They are going to have little doors such that when they are full - after more than about 5 to 10 years with an average sized family according to my calculations- then a truck can be sent from Mbour to come and pump them out.

Ah, composting, I almost forgot. So after much discussion, mostly with PC staff and my counterpart, the consensus is that, no, thats not going to work. Basically it boils down to the people refuse, the culture and religion does not allow for the handleing of even ones very decomposed waste, no matter how awsome it would be as fertilizer. The truck would dump out the moist soil junk out in peoples fields though, so in a way a very small space might see benifit, but then wherever it was they probably wouldnt be farming there. So, yeah, I hear these kinds of things have worked well in South America and work in Southeast Asia, but in West Africa, people regularly refuse to do such a thing. Sad.

Anyway, so more pictures are coming, oh, and I have been keeping my self busy with other stuff too. I made a second mud-stove the other day, much better than my first one and I think looks pretty awesome. I also went to the nearby college recently and did an English lesson that involved gender inequality. I thought it went ok, but it could have had more discussion or questions or something. I needed to wrap up better I guess. But it was really cool and I think they enjoyed it too.

Us Seereers in country, particularly Bethany and one tech savy Jack Brown, and I have been getting this Seereer-English dictionary into some final book like stages, so that will be awesome to have a version done by the end of my service.

Right, so those latrines will keep on coming and I will keep yall in the loop with pictures too. Mexe nosa