Water Issues

So, this rainy season, my village did not get as much rain as usual, which lead to all of the farmers’ corn not producing any actual corn. This is a big problem. People were hoping to eat that corn, and said people have very little in the way of means to eat something else instead. Most of the population of my village are subsistence farmers, and so this is a very serious issue for them.

Word on the street is that the Tanzanian government has some sort of program in place to give food to villages that don’t get enough rain, and they have already done this with my village, but apparently the government-provided food isn’t really enough. So I’m not really sure what’s going to become of this.

I’d been worried that some of my students would drop out as a result of their families shifting their school money away from school and towards food, but so far that hasn’t happened much. Although again, word on the street is that a lot of the students are being allowed to attend school without paying, and as a result the school has some serious monetary issues. The really obvious result of this, so far, is that so far every day this term the students have had ugali for dinner, and they’re getting sick of it and complaining.

One other note on the corn stuff: apparently dried corn stalks are useful in that cows will eat them, so farmers with cows can use their corn stalks to feed their cows, and those without can sell their corn stalks to those who do, so there’s some benefit coming in from the corn, but not as much as people were hoping.

Okay, so the next fun part of this: in the last several days, my village has started having a water shortage. The wells/pumps are only putting out a very small amount of water these days, presumably as a result of the lack of rain. So far I don’t think anybody’s going thirsty, but apparently fetching water is taking much longer than usual now, and people are trying to conserve.

Now, in Tanzanian schools, the culture is that the students fetch their own water, as well as fetching the teachers’ water, and I think also the teachers’ families’ water. As I’ve mentioned before, our wells are all something like half a kilometer from the school, far downhill. So this water-fetching was already a lot of work, and nowadays it’s considerably more work than it was before.

My school has a tractor, and said tractor has a trailer, and the school also has a giant (1000-liter) plastic water tank, so we’ve recently started using the tractor to fetch water on behalf of the students. Apparently this setup isn’t that great, though; I guess the trailer wasn’t meant to carry loads that heavy over distances that great on roads that rough, or something to that effect.

So, my school has issues. As does my village.

In other news, the Form 4 students (who are graduating this year) have to take big national exams if they want to continue their educations, and so their main focus right now is on studying for the exams. There is no computer exam, so as part of the plan, the school’s decided to stop teaching Form 4 computers for the remainder of the school year.

Additionally, a second computers teacher has arrived, and has taken over teaching Form 2 computers.

So I’ve now lost a good deal of my workload, and apparently I’m not picking anything else up, so I just have a lot more time now.

Peace Corps wants us all to do “secondary projects” in addition to teaching. These are basically any sort of development projects to help our schools or villages. So I am now very seriously looking into projects to do for the school.

One important thing Peace Corps Volunteers are taught about is writing grant proposals to bring money in to help with projects and whatnot. (A note: we are not supposed to do the grant-proposal-writing ourselves, but instead to get one of the permanent staff at our schools to do it, since we’ll be gone after two years but it would be good for the schools to be able to continue to get grant money.)

Now, doing projects is apparently a bit tricky in terms of finding really good/useful projects to do and doing them well, and as foreign volunteers here we are often perceived as money sources rather than coworkers, so I was planning to wait until my second year to start doing any sorts of projects that involved lots of money.

However, almost all of my current project ideas are either time-sensitive and require that I wait for a while, or require lots of money. So, I’m going to be busting out Peace Corps’s grant-proposal-writing guide and starting to figure all of that out.

I talked with my school’s secondmaster the other day, and he thinks probably what the school needs most, at least right now, is a water tank trailer for the tractor, one that’s designed to actually do this work and will do it well, as opposed to the current jerry-rigged setup. So, I’ll be continuing to look into that; I guess we’ll have to scope out prices and then write a grant proposal. I guess one issue is that this was an unusually bad year on the water front, so the need will presumably not be as great in the coming years, so I’ll have to consider that. A counterpoint, though, is that the water issue this year may be a result of climate change, and if so there’s a good chance it’ll start happening most years, and/or getting worse. I’ll have to figure all of that out in any case.

The other secondary project idea I have in relation to the water issue is “permagardening”, which is a particular gardening method that Peace Corps teaches us and recommends; supposedly (and as far as I can tell from what I’ve seen, actually) it works way better than the current/traditional farming methods, in just about any part of Tanzania, in terms of producing lots of food, in terms of using only a little water, in terms of working in nutrient-poor soil, and in terms of not depleting the soil’s nutrients over time. So, if I were able to get my villagers doing it, and it works as well as it supposedly does, it should help on the eating front, at least.

But you can’t just go out and tell people about this, because they either won’t believe you or won’t take the risk of it not working. And also I’ve never done any gardening before and don’t trust myself to do this properly on my own. But there are two or three teachers at my school who are interested in using this for personal gardens, though, so I’ve got a two-step plan:
1. Do personal permagardens with teachers at my school this rainy season, which means we’ve got to get the gardens set up sometime in like September/October/early November.
2. If it works, try to get my school to do a school permagarden, with the students doing the work. Hopefully the school garden will work really well and inspire the students to tell their families about it, slash also be seen by villagers passing the school, and hopefully get the idea into the village in a way where it’ll sound convincing-enough to be worth trying.

So that’s my master plan right now. Hopefully it’ll work. The issue is that it’ll take months/years to get to the villagers-adopting-it stage. There’s a reasonable chance that it’ll take until after my two years are up, and so it’s one reason why I’m seriously considering extending my service for a third year.

And one last note, I’ve got several other project ideas, but won’t be going into details here.

So that’s pretty much the news on the Serious Business front.