Friday, January 29, 2010

Am I crazy to be doing this again? Part II

Within a few hours of returning to the village after spending Christmas in Spain, I was summoned to the school to talk about the progress of the toilets in the Kookie village. Still not finished, of course, but the first foreman had been rehired so I was willing to call that a Christmas miracle in itself and be moderately happy that it looked like the project might soon be finished. The real Christmas miracle was when, as I was leaving the school, someone mentioned, oh, you should go down to the Izzie school, they started their bathroom project. "Wait, really? What? You're not kidding?" "No, really, they started while you were in Spain." "Impossible! I haven't even organized a meeting with them yet to talk about it." "Just go and look."
So I trekked down to the Izzie school, and sure enough, there was a freshly-dug well, clean and deep and full, the sanitation pit, and the foundation for where the bathrooms would be built. My appearance caused an impromptu assembly of all the men and teenage boys of the village, all eager to explain the floor plan, the depth of the well, how they carefully made sure the sanitation pit was far away from the well and downhill from it, and how the very day the director of the school called them together to explain the project they got out their shovels and started digging. They'd have had them built by now, they explained, but they were waiting for me to go with them to buy all the materials. They'd named a good foreman, split up into teams of three to four workers, and written up a list of all the materials they'd need. So we made plans to go into town early the next morning to buy everything. In front of the assembly, I made a short little speech declaring that I would not work with them if this project was going to be like the one in the Kookie school, that they needed to finish quickly and without any fighting, and that they needed to organize themselves because I was not going to come down every morning to make sure they were working and drag them out of their houses if they weren't.