Accomplishments during the last trimester

In my final few months, little was accomplished. Part of July was spent on vacation in Senegal.

I continued work in our Treadle Pump irrigated garden. We planted Moringa trees, hoping the villagers can/will use the branches for water treatment in the future. The trees have reached heights of between 1.5-2 meters since their planting in early August. The strawberries are surviving but not thriving, and the bananas continue to do well. We planted tomatoes, and as of several days ago they had begun to fruit. We planted them on raised beds for the pump to irrigate via canals. The plants took a beating as their beds eroded away and strong winds coming from the South during storms knocked over the plants. We simply stood them back up, and put some dirt around the roots, which worked pretty well.

The Treadle Pump worked very well at first, but eventually the new pistons were damaged because the inlet pipe was sucking up sand into the pump and wearing down the leather. I spoke with my family about it, and they say that they will dig out the inlet canal, Inshallah.

I worked a little more with the Rosso forgerons hoping that they could finish the pumps, but was again extremely disappointed in their talk-but-don't-work attitude.

I contracted and discovered that the disease Schistosomiasis was present in my village. As a result of my discovery, my final few months were spent in preparation of leaving, and in learning as much about the disease so that the information could be passed on to the villagers and incoming volunteers. I attempted to warn the villagers of the gravity of the situation, but was met with responses of "It won't affect us. It's not our fault. What can we do about it?" Upon speaking with the DRASS of Rosso, I learned that they do know of the problem, but that they feel that there is nothing that they can do about the problem, other than massive treatment campaigns. However, they did not have the money to purchase the drug for everyone at risk, and after treatment the villagers are still at risk for reinfection. In other words, we cannot effectively treat the disease when there is no other source of water, and all of the region is involved in rice farming.

I was further discouraged after talking with a representative of the World Health Organization. Who explained to me that in his country of Guinea, when boys begin urinating blood (from damage to the bladder induced from Schistosomiasis) it is seen as comparable to menstruation in women, that they are "coming of age."

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Summary of the past two years

Two years ago, I was affectated to the Wolof village of Breun. Once there, I found that the villagers were drinking river water. They had two wells, but they were salty and no one used them. Unlike the Mauritania I knew near Kaedi, I found that the region was intensively farmed with irrigated rice fields. As I came to learn, the villagers' diet was primarily fish, rice and oil.

Unable to work in any of the things I had primarily been trained in during stage, primarily Guinea Worm and well work, I focused my efforts on improving the nutrition of the villagers. I found that although many things could grow in the region as freshwater was always present, the villagers were virtually growing only plain white rice. I discovered that there were only three types of irrigation used: rain-fed, via large motorized pumps, and water carried in buckets on women's heads. I introduced the Treadle Pump, a man-powered pump that could efficiently irrigate areas bordering the river. I requested and received funding for a project installing twenty such pumps in my region. Upon further study, the sustainability of an imported pump was dubious, so I worked with local craftsmen who were taught to build the pump profitably, and at a lower cost than the imported pump.

Upon yet further research, I found that if the pumps were subsidized, which my approved project called for, then the market for the craftsmen commencing manufacture of the pump could be ruined. I drastically changed my project, cutting costs by seventy percent, while insuring that the pumps would have an enduring impact. As a result of my efforts, the Peace Corps instigated a countrywide program-training craftsmen to construct the pump.

Working with villagers in cooperation with another volunteer, I installed the first pump for use in a small garden. Using sustainable techniques previously unknown to villagers, I proved that a vegetable plot irrigated by the Treadle Pump could be grown on land previously unused for any purpose, and in the hot season, when villagers believed gardening was impossible.

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Observations

The information that I found helped me the most was not taught to me in stage. I found some in a book that I "borrowed" from the IRC, and other information I sent off for. In addition, I stole away to Senegal to buy a pump that I was discouraged from getting by my APCD, who suggested that I "would be like a Robinson Crusoe," and was simply interested in making a good life for myself here, with no concern for the villagers themselves.

However, I felt that if I was to find a way to make a difference here, the best way was to show the villagers what could work and make a difference in their lives. That is what I planned and did with the Treadle Pump and the improved cook stove. Perhaps the introduction of technology is not always appropriate, but I had a hunch that these technologies could sell here, and I still feel that way.

So often, the work development in general has done here has not addressed the villagers' needs to make money without harming the environment. Worldwide, people have worked to make money to buy the small oddities of technology, but in a way that is harmful to their environment. As Peace Corps, we have often taken the attitude that we just need to tell the people the good, small things they can do to improve their health. However, the work was very discouraging because change, if any, was so slow to come. In the matter of mosquito nets, when people had enough money to buy those for sale at a good price, they purchased them. All Africans did not just instantly go out and buy mosquito nets when they found out that they could help prevent malaria. Some Africans were educated in western-style schools and they were taught and understood that mosquitoes caused malaria, they went and talked to their families about it, and eventually the Africans started buying their own. I am sure that tubobs gave some out to try to save the poor Africans, but gifts such as these are never sustainable, and it was only when the Africans themselves started buying them that they became sustainable and started to make a real difference in their health.

The reasons that we want them to do things, that we think are clear, are not always the reasons the poor in this world do the things that they do. More than likely, mosquito nets are status symbols in many places. Some were indeed bought to decrease the likelihood of malaria, but I'll bet that many others bought them when they had the money to show that they had raised their standard of living.

With Guinea Worm, the biggest results were achieved only after large amounts of money were poured into the development and distribution of a technology that allowed villagers to filter their water before they drank it. These things were provided free of charge, and distributed to many, many people and were followed up by greatly increased monitoring, education and treatment campaigns. Relatively speaking, Guinea Worm is an easy disease to eradicate. I do not know of another disease that we could attack in the same way and have the same results we have had. The amount of money necessary to do it is simply not there. It would not have been eradicated simply by "animations," unless we did it for centuries. As Americans, we do not have the patience to wait that long.

The greatest impact Peace Corps makes is in simply "being there," which other NGO's simply do not do. As capitalistic Americans, we can make an impact. However, those are very hard to come by when we are so alone and have so few resources. I do not think it is right to come here and do the work for these "poor people," but nor is it comfortable to us or justifiable to Congress who pays the bills that we come here and do nothing. Therefore, there must be some balance between the two. Fortunately, Mauritania could very well be the least developed country on the face of the earth. There is still a lot of room for Peace Corps to do good development, but we need less pressure and more support to be able to do it. As American volunteers, no one knows our village situation and what could be possible better than we do. Not Mauritanian officials, nor the Peace Corps bureau. Therefore we should be given much leeway to try and do our jobs right: a job that has never been done by anyone here before.

We often feel that the Peace Corps bureau is policing us. We feel that to come to Nouakchott for a cold beer or to see our friends, we are trying "to get away with something." We know that the office is busy and does not have time to know each of our stories, even if they care. For us to try to justify ourselves while doing such rigorous work is impossible.

We need much more informal time with our peers. We hear, "Well, schedule an event where volunteers can get together and exchange ideas and work together, and let us know what you will be doing every hour of the time you are together, and when you are done, you will all return to your sites." But, when we are so lonely for so long, we need informal time to get together for something other than work. We used to do this every three or four months or so, but now that we get our checks at site, we no longer have this option. I believe, and other ex-pats in the community say that this is the worst thing that has ever been done to the volunteers in the history of the program here in Mauritania.

We hear, "You have vacation days. Use them to go see each other." We get two vacation days per month, and we get one-day weekends. We could easily spend two months of vacation time travel time to another site in Mauritania. In addition, after living in such difficult conditions, we usually want to get the hell out of this place where we can eat well, relax and see some pretty scenery. Much as it might seem possible, time spent here in most of this country can not be a vacation (at least until the PCVs buy a 4x4).

I do not know from where it has slithered, the idea that all volunteers are disobedient children that need to be corrected. Perhaps life can be a true vacation in some of the nicer PC countries, and the office has to play a watchdog role to get them to work. However, Mauritania is such a difficult country, I could work less, make more money, and eat better living in my Mom's back yard and eating dog food. This is not a vacation, much as it may seem so. Where does this fourth unwritten goal come from, that we must suffer? And what makes the office think that for us to suffer that it must be dictated to us from up on high.

Recently, when the new stagiares were coming for a quickie introduction to Mauritanian village life, an APCD said in a statement to a hosting volunteer "This is not a party!" These constant contemptuous statements do much to erode our moral, and little to make our experience here any better.

Recently I was faced with the decision of reinfecting myself with a potentially dangerous disease, increasing the risk of villagers by sending them to get my water for me, or moving to a new village or a city where I would be losing all of my support, and replacing it with nothing. This is fine for new volunteers, where we will have two years to build up relationships. However, the time period for me was going to be only 3 months, something hardly worth the amount of stress it would have placed on me. When I asked to be reaffectated to another region to work with other volunteers, I was denied, with the statement, "Trey, you are here to work with the people, yet you keep saying you want to work with the volunteers. That is not your job." What is our job? Am I sick for wanting to do something with someone who can benefit from my hard-earned knowledge? Heaven forbid us from sharing our experience.

I was later informed that perhaps my ultimatum to leave or be placed in an uncomfortable situation might not have been about me at all. If a soon to be C.O.S.ing volunteer who wants to stay and help pass on his knowledge is forced to leave because of a power struggle between an APCD and others within the office, it is a crime. This is support? I thought the bureau was here to support us, the volunteers. Where would the bureau be without volunteers? What is Peace Corps without volunteers?

When big money is spent on development, the people paying for it and planning it do not tap into the ideas of the people that will be affected by it. Having been there as PCVs will enlighten us, and perhaps once we return to the states we can be better citizens, in that we won't be anxious to fund bad development, send over food to "help the poor" which will be sold by the people running the country, or tolerate a war where innocent people are being harmed because we have no connection with them.

The villagers I know are not mindless savages that have to be taught to wash their hands. They need to not be screwed over by the Mauritanian Government. I have met with people at the agricultural research station who are paid to experiment in seed and fruit production, yet do not visit with villagers and teach them techniques because they do not have the means to get to them. I have visited with a government soil specialist, who came to my village and said he was shocked that the villagers were not using the river water that lies next to the village to grow fruit trees and vegetable crops. I find that government employees are less aware of the village situation and mentality than I am, and they have lived here all their lives.

There are some government officials who are honest and work hard, but these are far overworked and have few resources, much like PCVs. I do not believe that any of us have the time to learn about the problems that villagers face and get to know the ins and outs of the bureaucratic system here. In any project, the more people who are involved and the more complex the project, the better the chances that people will be attempting to get their hands on their funds for their own personal use. If there is no continuity in our work, there is no way volunteers can find people they trust to involve them in a project. We simply do not have the time, for we are so naïve when we get here.

We need more of a choice in what we do. For those of us that want to work closely with the government, encourage us to do so. Support the volunteers that want it with the information that they need. For those volunteers that want to go sit and read books for two years, hell, why not encourage them to do that. If they are respectful of the citizens, more good will come of them being here doing nothing but learning of the culture by living in it than by doing bad development projects. For those of us that want to try something new, encourage us and give us the space and the means to do it. This is tough work, we are naïve when we get here, and we can't be told everything we need to know in a 3 month stage. If we stay and we like it here, we will have done the most important job of all: bridging cultures.

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Recommendations

For this pump to work here, someone will have to produce high quality pumps and be competent at informing he buyer of the pumps just how to maintain and install the pumps so that they will work here. My forgerons think that the problems are "pas grave." The pumps they have built now will not work more than two weeks without destroying the piston cups, the owners will be disappointed with the pumps, and the market will potentially be ruined. The forgerons at ATMAR say that the problems with the pumps are a result of the training, where they were worked too hard and that some of the people welding the pumps were novices and hence did not do a quality job. However, the pumps they constructed after the training suffer from the same flaws. I do not know how they can resolve the problems with the pumps. In the words of the PCV pump trainer, "I don't really know how they could fix them (the pumps)."

I have not seen them available here, but in the states there is a small hand-held moto-tool that could possibly be used to grind down the sharp edges inside of the cylinder. If they could do this, the pumps could conceivably work.

In addition, Jay Withington, the pump trainer, has encouraged the forgerons to attempt to buy locally made leather for the piston cups. While it would be nice to have a local supplier, everything I have read about the pump tells me that without the right quality leather, the pumps will quickly fall into disrepair.

So far, this does not matter to the forgerons, who do not use the pump, and are not concerned with reliability. Their attitude so far has been that they just want to advertise the pumps and get them sold, and if the pumps break after they are sold, then they can make money on repairs. In a perfect world, the pump buyers would demand that the pumps are of the highest quality. I believe that the buyers will not do this and instead will keep trying to make the pumps work. If they hire people to pump for them, they will blame the worker instead of the pump manufacturers for lack of proper irrigation. Meanwhile, even though the pumps aren't properly made ATMAR sells the pump on the idea alone with a quick demonstration, and pockets a quick 20,000 um for each pump they are selling. Another point: the profit margin is too high for their flawed pumps. They will sell a few pumps, make some dough, and just quit building the pumps before anyone knows what hit them. I may sound a bit cynical, but this is what I believe could very possibly happen.

How do we prevent all of this? How could we get the forgerons themselves to use the pumps for a period of time before they build and sell them? They need to know about the problems with quality, and also the limitations of the pump. One of the forgerons told my village mom the other day that their pumps can irrigate an area as large as three hectares. I almost choked, and later I told her that that was completely untrue. They know better, because we have discussed all of these issues before. They are going to lie to the customers, make a few bucks on repairs, and get the hell out of dodge before anyone knows what hit them. Is this my fault? I've learned many lessons by now, but I still don't know what to do about these problems. I cannot start over. Perhaps my statements here can help, if anyone ever reads them.

Perhaps the business volunteer in Rosso can work with the pump manufacturers to encourage them to improve their quality. Were it me, as soon as the ATMAR boys paid off their 153,000 um debt, I would tell them to either make the pumps right, or train another forgeron in the area to build the pump.

For a Water/San Volunteer, I would encourage the Peace Corps to place someone who was very interested and somewhat knowledgeable in nutrition. They would need many gardening skills, hence access to an agro-forestry volunteer if possible.

If I could have my ideal replacement, it would be a female (more easily accepted by the women,) would be self-assured and tough as hell, and would speak the language well enough to tell off the villagers constantly asking for gifts. This may sound a bit harsh, but if a volunteer was to replace me in the region and went around trying to appease the villagers by giving them gifts or poorly planned projects, they would help the villagers a lot more by just going home.

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Additional Site Information

The villagers in the region of Rosso have had their lives and culture stripped away from them. Some, I am sure, have given up their culture willingly, but few others have struggled to keep their past. Today, most villagers are only interested in cement houses and a few cheap imported goods from China. Virtually all of the children are malnourished. The villagers have told me in the old days just did not happen. When I asked my village mom why she would not get on the Treadle Pump, she said that she just couldn't. Another volunteer, an anthropologist, suggested that the culture prevented women from doing such things. However, I remembered that in the past, my mom had told me about her grandmother, and that how the woman was unstoppable from dusk to dawn, doing the housework and farming and delivering babies and healing the sick. I said, "I bet your grandmother would have pumped!" My mom replied, "Yes, she would have, but she ate better than we do."

The long periods of drought hurt, but their lives were destroyed by the government, who came down and parceled out the land to Moors and to each individual Wolof citizen. The Wolofs used to farm only along the river when the water went down, but the government came and marked off all of the land for private citizens, including the woods, where the Wolofs used to go to get their wood, but nothing more. Once the land was sectioned off, Moors and Wolofs alike cut down all of the trees on the land to be cultivated. It is true that many of these trees were dead due to the droughts, but certainly not all of them. However, the mere act of cutting down all of the dead trees and removing them removed a large measure of protection for the soil from wind, rain, and sun. With the trees gone, nothing was left to prevent all of the fertile topsoil from being baked, blown, and washed away.

Shortly after the "domaine nationale" program, the dam was installed at the mouth of the Senegal River. The dam kept out the salt water, allowing year-round irrigated agriculture. The rice business hit full swing then, but it could not replace the diet of large, fatty ocean fish, or the wild rice, millet, fonio, melons, and tomatoes the villagers grew on their once fertile land. Now that the trees and topsoil are gone, villagers can't grow plants without irrigation and chemical fertilizers, a practice unknown to them only a short time ago.

Today, the villagers subsist on a diet of fish, plain white rice, and imported vegetable oil. Few villagers eat fruits, and the exceptions are when melons are in season. They grow and eat peanuts and beans in the rainy season, and each year the crops are iffy. Bissap is grown, and sometimes the cooked leaves are eaten with meals. In season, tomatoes are cheap (40 um/kilo) and plentiful, but the season doesn't last long. Many tomatoes rot before they are sold.

Within the two villages of Breun, there is an underlying tension that I have never been able to understand. About 5 years ago, UNICEF, having consulted previously with the villagers in gardening, fenced in 5 hectares of land, supplied a moto-pump, seeds, tools, wheel-barrows, garden training, training in accounting, fertilizer and pesticides. The project provided virtually everything needed to be successful. They made one mistake. Previously, women of the two villages had worked separately. Now, UNICEF combined the women of the two villages into one cooperative garden. The villagers all agreed that it would work fine; that both Breuns were the same. However, if the villagers could work together, why hadn't they done it before?

Today, there is nothing planted in the UNICEF garden. I was told that when the villages worked separately that they competed and even had rooms in their houses stocked full of onions. They couldn't refuse to work together, because then UNICEF wouldn't have given them the stuff. They got it, and now the tools are all broken, the fence is falling down, and the villagers have no money to buy seeds. There is a lot of animosity between the two villages of Breun, and between Breun and other Wolof villages in the region. I do not understand it, for they are all Wolof, many or all of them are related somehow, and it seems that in a nation where they are the smallest minority group, that they would stand together. If this animosity could somehow be directed towards healthy competition between the villages, something productive might be done. I do think it is necessary to recognize these rival tendencies. I wish someone had warned me.

Without some serious attention by qualified development workers, or the removal of the dam, the traditional Wolof culture of Southern Mauritania will be lost forever, if it hasn't been already.

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Thanks

A few Mauritanians have made my life here a bit easier. Mame Kany Basse made my training fun, mainly in French but in some English and whatever Wolof she could force me to speak. She taught me far more about the Wolof culture and Mauritanians than I ever heard in our cross-culture classes. During my time of moving strife, Khady N'Diaye was my only savior. In Breun, Ahmed N'Daw gave me hope that someone here was interested in doing something other than grow rice. Without the love of my family, including Khady Fall, Fatou N'daw, my siblings Bayfara, Aminta and Fama Diagne, I never would have made it here. They have fed me as they have eaten, and took me in as family. I can never forget them.

Posthumously, as I have just heard that he has died of an unknown cause, Momadou Ba, the director of the school in Breun deserved more thanks than he ever received from me or any other villagers. A Pulaar affectated to teach in a Wolof village, he tolerated indifference by the adults in the village as he strived to give their children a good education. It was with him that the first Treadle Pump was experimented with in the children's garden. A good man who cared, he looked after me when the Wolofs of Breun wouldn't welcome me. Thank you Mr. Ba.

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