A Busy PCT (Peace Corps Trainee)

Another week has gone by and I have now been in the Peace Corps a full month. If I can keep up the blog entries to once a week, I shall have to be content since that is more journal writing than I’ve done in years! As you know, I didn’t get the blogs posted last week since there was no way to upload the blog since the internet café was closed and I couldn’t do it through my ipod touch. I did, however get a cell phone. Please feel free to call me at any time since I am still desperate for communication with family and friends even though I am starting to develop friendships here, Teri being the best potential. I don’t want to publish the number online but check my Facebook profile for it or ask someone in my family.

Tuesday of this week we had the most exciting session of any thus far; Introduction to PACA. PACA stands for Participatory Analysis for Community Action and is a standardized approach for community development that focuses on involving the community members in the planning, execution and follow-up of community development projects. Quite remarkable in how it’s used by PCVs to get community members excited about their own development but more importantly giving them a sense of ownership of these projects so that it doesn’t become another situation where rich white people come in and give them stuff because a lot of times that is what they have come to except from Western NGO’s and so called “Development efforts”. PACA is going to become extremely useful in the field because it will allow us to be facilitators for change without dictating what that change should be and how it should be done. So many development projects fail because the facilitators, although well intentioned, they don’t take the time to involve the community in what they do. Even though they may respond t specific needs, without ownership, a community will never fully appreciate the value of the development initiative and it will be wasted. As an example is the well that was built by an NGO, used a little but left untouched when it broke because the villagers did not consider it ‘their’ well. Then of course there are cultural differences that often go unbeknownst, even to Nigerien development facilitators . An example of this is the emergency food program that so often gives food relief to malnourished children and to people with malaria. The food given is often a high-calorie pompinut biscuit that is said to work miracles in terms of returning the body to a healthy state. Well biscuits are often considered children’s food so the food program evaluators found that the malaria stricken adults would sell their biscuits or give them to kids.

Yesterday (Wednesday) we had our first Journee en Ville which is a technical trip set to expose the trainees to more details of what work might actually be like. We visited a current MCD near Niamey and listened to her mayor give a presentation about the work of his office and the relations to the traditional village chiefs. Essentially what happened with Decentralization in Niger is that the central government divided the country into 256 communes where the local population elected a council who in turn selected a mayor from among themselves. This is all good in theory but a lot of times there can be tension between the system of traditional village and regional chiefs since a lot of the mayoree’s tasks were previously conducted by the traditional chiefs. In addition, the system of decentralization is so new that many times the people in the communes as well as the mayor himself are often unsure about the exact role they are supposed to play. Thirdly, the Central Government seems to have done little but set up the mayorees and haven’t been to active in providing additional support, financial or otherwise. Finally the severe lack of resources due to a lack of standardized tax collection system means that the mayorees only have the means to execute a fraction of what their budgets propose. There was supposed to be an election to elect new councils in 2008 but that will not happen. As you probably get form this description, the system of decentralization in Niger is far from our idea of a local government and there will be plenty of opportunities to work on my patience building once I get to post.

After visiting with the mayor we went to a local school and witnessed a presentation by the newly formed student government. An education volunteer had helped set it up and it was amazing to see the dedication in the kids talking about the minister for sports organizing a school soccer tournament and the minister for health organizing a malaria awareness campaign. A lot of MCDs are interested in setting up student government and given the success of the one we witnessed yesterday I am certain it could very well be done.

The one thing I keep reminding myself though is not to set to definitely plans before I become integrated into my village because what can be done will depend so heavily on the motivations and aspirations of the villagers and my counterpart. My counterpart will be a local villager that is connected to the Mayoree in some way and will act as a link between me and the villagers. Having a motivated counterpart can apparently make or break your Peace Corps experience so I really hope I get one with a lot of kokeri (i.e. effort or motivation).

Today we had the first of two possibilities to pass the required language proficiency level. I spoke Zarma fairly fluently but know that I stumbled a couple times and am not at all certain I reached intermediate mid even though I am definitely above the novice level. We also had site interviews which means there is nothing to do but wait for one more week because on August 14 we will learn our permanent site placements and I can start conceptualizing where my home will be for the two years of my Peace Corps Service. Yesterday was the midpoint of PST and from now it is downhill until Swear-In on September 12.

If you’ve gotten to this point of my blog you’ve done well. It came out to 8 pages in a Word Document and I’m sure it took you a while to get through it all. Please leave a comment and please let me know if you have questions so that I can include it in my next blog entry that should be posted with more frequency since I can now go to Niamey every week.