An ka kolonba

Sorry it's been so long...things are hectic these days with thoughts of returning home (Is it really that time already? What on earth will I do?), wrapping things up here (How do you say goodbye to people who have become like family to you?), and not having a computer any more (mine seems to have called it quits as a result of the heat, dust, etc.). At this point, it looks like I will be returning home to the US in late September, ni Ala sonna.

It has been a very busy few months, probably the busiest in my whole Peace Corps service. One of the main things that happened was the construction of a 1.5 m diameter well in our women's garden. During my initial community assessment (using PACA), the construction of a well was determined to be the top priority of women in my village. This is something that every woman in the association pushed for - an amazing feat considering half of the group refuses to speak to the other half due to a longstanding disagreement.

Project planning began as far back as last November/December, when I worked with Peace Corps staff to learn the basics about building wells. Perhaps you weren't aware, but at the time I knew zilch about building wells. I also met with the entire women's association multiple times to discuss their plans for the future of the garden and their motivation for the project. The association chose 5 women, in addition to my homologue, with whom I would work with to carry out the project. We met regularly throughout the duration of the project to plan, divide responsibilities and troubleshoot. After three weeks of work during May, our beautiful new well was completed.

Sounds rosy, right? Actually, it was one of the hardest, most onerous projects I've ever had to work on. From the first month when I visited a local well digger's house 6 times (not to mention the messages sent by our mayor, dugutigi and additional visits by my homologue), each time to have him say, "Yes! I can dig your well; I will come discuss it with you tomorrow, ni Ala sonna." More than one month was spent in this pursuit as the hot season began and the well-digging season was well into effect. Turns out what he really meant by "yes" was, "I can't do the work, I'm too busy with these other wells that I'm being paid millions of CFA to build by an NGO." The total budget for my well was less than 1,000,000 CFA (~2000 USD). So, we hired well diggers from Bamako, who charged more than three times what we had anticipated as the cost of well digging.

As the project progressed my village wouldn't produce the required community contribution of gravel and sand. I had waited to buy materials for the project until I had the full monetary contribution in hand - turns out that was the easy part! I won't go into details, but it got so bad that I was left shoveling gravel into a donkey cart with a 10 year old boy, who then stood me up and didn't come back for a second load. Further, my homologue, who is my greatest link to the community and who I would call the "mover" of the village, was absent for all but the last couple days of the project due to a death in her family. Then, our lead well digger's foot got infected, which led to a full-blown infection of his body. He couldn't walk or do manual labor the last 2 weeks of the project, though he was at least able to oversee the laying of bricks in the well. Our second well digger's pregnant wife got sick in Bamako, so he had to leave for four days. A local man refused to give sand and gravel to the women's association for free. The women's association president complained that she wasn't given enough compensation to host the well diggers (each of 120 women had contributed a small amount of money and millet). One of the well diggers complained they hadn't eaten meat for a week - on a day that I had planned to spend a fair amount of my own money to buy them a bowl of smoked goat meat. The well diggers from my town started showing up 3 hours late to avoid the tiring task of pulling water (they had to clear the well of 1-2 meters of water each morning before digging could commence, often making them too tired to continue digging once the well was dry).

On the last day of work, I found three young men to pull water out of the well in the morning, allowing all of the well diggers to save their energy for digging. The well was finished that day - a depth of 8.5 meters, width of 1.5 meters, with Dutch bricks laid in the top 3 meters of the well. A few days before the end of the project, my homologue told me that we forgot to sacrifice a chicken before we started digging, and that we could have prevented most of our problems had we done so. Well, shoot, wish I had known!

All of the women were ecstatic that the well was finished. In the morning and afternoon, 10-15 women would be gathered around the well, pulling water for their gardens. At the same time last year, I remember being one of just a few people still trying to hack out a garden with the scarce water that was available!

A week later, when I was in Bamako, I got a call from my homologue saying that the well had dried out each of the last three days. That's not to say the well was dry, but that the women were pulling so much water that they were using up the water faster than it could recharge (there was a little over 6 m3 water). My heart sank - the whole point of the well was to have sufficient water access even at the driest point of the year. I'm told that even if we had dug to our goal of 10 meters, the well would still dry out with the demand that the women are placing on it. Even so, I'm left with a bitter taste in my mouth because my superiors told me to stop digging rather than to dig all of the way to 10 meters. They said we had enough water already and that it was pointless to keep going. And, not knowing about wells, I said okay.

Lessons learned:

-Try even harder to work out the project plan with the women piece by piece. Who will get the sand and gravel? (Where, When, How, How much?)
-Set up a schedule for pulling water to help the well diggers.
-You need to sacrifice a chicken or two before starting well digging
-Don't always trust people when your gut tells you they're wrong, etc.

As far as capacity building, how did I do? That is, after all, why I joined Peace Corps. I did okay. I tried as hard as I could to make the women do the majority of planning and implementation, but it didn't work well. They learned a little about budget management and project planning. The two well diggers from my village are now trained in both top well repair and construction of a well with Dutch bricks. With the materials from the project remaining in the hands of the women’s association, they could easily complete this same type of well on their own, in the future. Capacity building was one of my main goals as a PCV – I didn’t do as well as I had hoped with this project. But, at least we have a well!


Here are some pictures from the well construction; this is from the first day of well digging, when we thought things were going to be easy.

Digging in the well a couple of weeks later – lots of progress!

This is how you get out of the well before there are bricks laid in it.  Kind of looks like fun to be pulled up and down on a rope!

Here is Diama laying the first cement in the well.  We used Dutch bricks, popular with PC/Mali because they use far less cement than other types of bricks. 

These are the men who worked for three weeks to build the new well in my village.