February, 2002
I’ve gotten lots of interesting questions lately and realize I haven’t done a good job of sharing some of the details with you all. So here is a random gathering of answers to a random gathering of questions you might have had.
Churches
Taabo, and all of southern Cote d’Ivoire, is mostly Christian. We celebrated Christmas here. Northern Cote d’Ivoire is mostly Muslim. Because Taabo has a large immigrant population (invited here in 1975 to help build the hydro electric plant), we also have lots of Muslims. Tabaski, which was Friday Feb 22, shut down all of Taabo just as much as Christmas did. In fact, our bus company is run by a group of Muslims, and I was unfortunate enough to be trying to travel on Tabaski. It wasn’t easy.
There is a mosque in Taabo, as well as a Catholic church, Methodist church, and Assembly of God church. The mosque and Catholic church are regular religious-looking buildings. The Methodist and Assembly of God churches meet in buildings that look more like houses. All services in the churches are done in French, and the music is a combination of tunes I recognize and African music.
None of that means that people do not believe in and/or practice sorcery here. There is a lot of talk of sorcery, and people truly believe in its power. In addition, there is talk of sacred forests and sacred rivers (sacred to an earth god or goddess) which are holdovers from before the population was converted to Islam or Christianity. People here don’t see the combination as a conflict at all.
Change of Seasons
Looks like the dry season has ended and the rainy season has started. It’s rained here at least a little bit four days in the last week. I’m not sure I’m ready to be surrounded by mud again. Last June when I arrived in Cote d’Ivoire during the rainy season, I remember wondering whether my feet would ever be clean again.
On the other hand, the change of seasons is nice, and I’m looking forward to a new selection of fruits and vegetables. The pickings at the market here in Taabo have been extremely slim lately!! I can find tomatoes, oranges, and onions, but I haven’t seen anything green at the market in months. Mangoes, pineapples, and papayas will be the next fruits in season. Yum!! They taste better here when they’re freshly picked off the trees, trust me!
New Training Class
A new group of trainees arrived in Cote d’Ivoire on January 24. I have met the new trainees three times, teaching diversity sessions during their training. There are 40 new trainees. This class will be health volunteers and rural water sanitation volunteers. The diversity sessions went well.
I also hosted five rural water sanitation volunteers in Taabo for a week. I wrote about our adventures in the posting called "Seeing Taabo Through New Eyes." We had a blast…and learned a lot. Check out the posting if you haven’t already done that.
I do want to highlight one trainee who I haven’t gotten to talk to one-on-one yet. He’s a 72 year old man who left his wife at home to pursue this adventure! My hat is off to this courageous man. His application to the Peace Corps said, in part, that he wanted to serve while he was still able to do so physically. Amen, brother!
Perhaps this is a calling for a couple of you after retirement too??
Project Status - The Sewage Ditch Project
I worked during January and February on a funding proposal to get rid of the sewage problems in one neighborhood in Taabo. The was at the end of February and I was not ready with everything in time. It’s my fault really…I frittered away a large part of February and wasn’t very focused on the proposal. Between putting together the diversity training sessions and hosting the trainees for a week, I just didn’t make much progress on the proposal.
The next deadline is May 28, so the raw sewage in Taabo will have to sit until then. I am hopeful the extra time will give me a chance to really get the community lined up behind this project. The longer the ethnic chiefs have to talk up the project, the more successful it will be.
The proposal calls for us to dig ditches ¾ meter deep and fill them with gravel. The sewage from the broken/full latrines will run at the bottom of the trenches, and the gravel will make the ditches safer for crossing and walking. We will train women to throw laundry, bath, and dish water into the trenches too, to keep the sewage moving along to the bottom of the hill. There it will be collected in large pits where the ground will have a chance to absorb it. The design is really quite simple, but hopefully it will get this raw sewage underground where people won’t have to walk in it and breathe the fumes all day.
I will send Mme. Webmaster a drawing of the neighborhood and proposed project so you can envision it better.
Project Status - The Women’s Farming Cooperative
Working with these women continues to be some of the most rewarding work I do. I have so much faith that these women can successfully change their world for the better! Collingwood Presbyterian Church in Toledo, OH, has offered to help these women obtain a truck so their products can get to market. Such a blessing! My work recently has been focused on registering the cooperative with the government. It’s been much more complicated than it should be, since the village moved in 1985, and Taabo has refused to recognize them as an official village. But the old location, Moronou, has also refused to recognize them as an official village since they have been gone so long. So these people are being denied the right to vote and do business, and it seems to be rooted in the fact that neither city wants to be bothered to process the paperwork to recognize N’Gouan Amoin Kro as a village. Ridiculous.
Once we get through this, my next steps will be to do some simple business training with the women and then help them find customers for their products. Once we get a little money in the cooperative’s account, we will pursue literacy classes for the women. Long term goals are to do experiments with fertilizer vs. compost and to get the women to try some "value added" work with their produce, for example, making mango jam instead of simply selling mangoes. Value added is a completely foreign concept here, but it’s where the money is. Selling cacao is nothing compared to the profit in processing it into chocolate. While I don’t feel like we can build a chocolate processing factory, I do think we can alter our products to make them more valuable (and more profitable) in the marketplace.
An Upsetting Medical Story
While I was in N’Gouan Amoin Kro last month, they showed me a child who had fallen into a large pot of boiling tomato sauce just the night before. The poor child (perhaps 8 or 10 years old) was burned from just above his knees to the middle of his back. His skin was absolutely black. It was terrible.
I urged the village to take the boy to the hospital, but they felt it would cost too much. The boy was lying under a mosquito net in the shade. They had sent someone to a traditional healer to look for a powder that would help the burn heal. I showed them how to clean the burn carefully with clean water and clean washcloths, but continued urging them to get the boy to the hospital.
How lucky we are that we have healthcare that is obligated to treat people in emergency situations, regardless of their ability to pay (admittedly not a perfect system…). And how lucky we are that most of us have insurance to cover emergencies such as this. I just cannot imagine an accident like this happening in the US without treatment. (Since we don’t cook on open fires on the ground, the accident is a little less likely in the US anyway.)
This situation made me realize that I don’t know anything about the health care system here in Cote d’Ivoire. So last time I was in Abidjan, I talked with some health volunteers about the level of care required by law in emergency situations. The volunteers assured me that the hospitals are obligated to treat such an emergency, and allow payment to be made in instalments afterwards. But often, poor villagers must fight to get the hospitals to honor this obligation.
The volunteers also assured me that if I, the American, showed up at the hospital with the child, the hospital would not put up a fight. How sad that my status as a Westerner is the trump card in situations like this. Talk about a holdover from the many years of colonization…
New Latrine Project
I got two requests from villages that we visited when the trainees were here to work on latrine projects. I’ve put up with a lot of BS in my career, but I never expected to be the person digging the holes to house the BS!! J The usual Peace Corps project for latrines is that the community digs the hole and builds the walls (can be as simple as a curtain surrounding the latrine or as complex as cement brick walls with a tin roof), and the Peace Corps pays for the bricks that line the hole and the cement slab that supports the latrine user.
I will offer the project to all the villages near Taabo (6 or 7 villages) and tell them that they need to find at least 15 families to participate. Lots of education goes along with a latrine project like this…Why use a latrine? Why wash hands afterwards? How to clean a latrine? What to do when the latrine is full?
To many people, doing their business out in a sunny, breezy field is preferable to going in a stinky latrine. I can see their point. Fortunately, the fear of snakes is one thing that often motivates people to decide a latrine is a better option. Hey – any help I can get educating people – I’ll take it!!
Sorry… I Just Can’t Beat Your Kid…
One of the little neighbor kids kicked mud on me the other day. He was mad because I wouldn’t let him eat a rotten orange. I threw it in the field for the sheep to eat instead. (I’m so mean!) He purposely kicked mud on me, so I yelled at him and then went next door to talk to his mother about his behavior.
For behavior this terrible, a kid in Cote d’Ivoire is normally whipped several times with a thin branch from a tree. Yes, this is hard for me to accept, and yes, when kids are being difficult, I have to go in the house where I won’t see the kid being beaten. But I do accept the action as a normal way to discipline your kids in this culture. And I have explained that in the US, at least where I’m from, you don’t beat your kids.
Well, my neighbor just couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t whip her kid for this action! After all, I was the one covered with mud. And since she and I are friends, "sisters" she said, of course I have permission to discipline her kid.
It took me quite awhile to explain that for 38 years I’ve been taught that kids aren’t for hitting, and for 8 months I’ve lived in a culture where it’s normal…that isn’t enough time for me to adjust.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to hit a child, or even stomach the sound of a child being hit with a stick. On the other hand, I’m not sure it’s something I can change while I’m here. It’s tough.