Your Best Resource

About this time two years ago, I (yes, I, faithful readers) was scouring the interwebs for blogs from current volunteers about what it was like living in Peru, living in rural areas, and what volunteers DID.   In the process, I remember stumbling over one blog that gave me a little fright.  It was a WATSAN volunteer’s blog, and he wrote about doing survey work to improve a waterlines (or something along the theme) in the community. Survey work? Sounds like engineering!  Fuck.  I look on the dude’s profile, and he’s a Master’s International Student in Engineering and has a giant beard. I qualified for WATSAN with skills as a carpenter in a college theatre and mediocre Spanish grades. I am neither an engineer nor a facial hair grower.  How am I going to survive in Peru (a fear reverberated by most other volunteers, especially sans beard)?

(First off) Well, two years later I gotta say – it didn’t matter that I wasn’t an engineer. My job (and most Peace Corps jobs) didn’t require being engineer but rather just being a leader.  Being a leader in the community and knowing how to talk to people.  So when I didn’t know something and I hit a wall.  I did have some good resources.

I’ll let you in on a little hint: your best resource is….

So What’s Been Going on with the Bathroom Project

When people would ask me in January about my project, I would go on and on about the wonders of dry bathrooms and how they're a great solution to rural sanitation projects (which they are), and about how we had the support of the local government and it was going to be great! My old high school raised about $3000 to contribute to the project, families were all progressing on their hygiene practices, it was great! I was on the fast track and looking  to complete the construction of 22 bathroom units by late June, and possibly run another bathroom campaign. 

That was then.

Now when my host family asks me 'Que tal el proyecto?', I tell them I really don't want to talk about it.   What's happened?

Starting to Build Bathrooms and Defy Local Belief that Obras CAN Happen

Note: I originally wrote this as an e-mail to a former teacher/current friend who contributed and coordinated heavily to my Peace Corps Partnership Project fund for building 22 dry bathrooms in two small rural farming communities. 

Yo Sav,

First off - Happy Dia del Padre compadre.

I wrote awhile back saying I'd have an update for you in the next week or so, but I'm sure you put on your 'International Development timeline' filter, and a week or so translated to how ever long this time span is.    But the good news is here, sir.  We've FINALLY starting on the bathroom project.  Although the Municipal funds are still in limbo, I decided there was no sense waiting when we at least had some of the money (from the Lebo donation).  We made the bulk purchases and picked them up from the distributor with the municipal dump truck last Thursday - enough bricks/rebar/cement for four units.  Our maestro is currently hard at work laying the first concrete slabs - I'll have pictures later in the week (re-activate International Development Timeline filter).  Like a good gringo, I'm there mostly to walk around with a clip board, providing technical support as needed, as well as a few photo ops. 

A Corps in Crisis? Not so fast Charles Kenney

I’ll be the first to admit that Peace Corps has its flaws. And indeed a model based largely on sending 20-something recent college graduates across the world to good seems a bit flawed in this day and age. After all, Peace Corps was started in 1962 – just after the Marshall Plan and when humanitarian aid for development was country to country cash transfer. Sending people abroad to work in communities was a new approach as was community based development. Policy makers still believed in the trickledown effect back then.

But we’re in a different world today. Both the supply and the demand side of Peace Corps has changed. NGOs and humanitarian organizations are sophisticated. In terms of demand, people around the world are becoming more educated and are attending trade schools and universities in greater numbers. Students strive to be engineers, doctors, lawyers etc in the same vein of past generations of Americans. In terms of supply, the humanitarian aid/development field has proliferated with UN agencies, regional INGOs, NGOs and all other kinds of acronyms working at all levels on issues from food security, micro-credit, youth development, and any other subtheme. While there’s still demand for aid organizations, they become less precious when the market expands and gets crowded. There’s a host of other organizations that do programming areas better than Peace Corps. So is Peace Corps even necessary?