Work Update

All that partying, its amazing anything ever gets done around here. With a full month of festivities added to a couple of mandatory Peace Corps conferences, it may seem like nothing much got done since Thanksgiving.

Au contraire mon frere – we’ve been busy plugging away at helping Tchaourou become a healtheir and/ or welthier place since the last work update.

Steve has started his accounting classes, the culmination of 4 months of planning and recruiting. He’s pretty excited and thinks he’s sussed out a half dozen who should make good students and better teachers.

Steve is also starting work on an identity card drive, a huge problem in getting the local economy on track. With the exception of anyone born in the last 10 years, only two of five people are going to have identity cards, meaning as far as the government and economy are concerned there are three in five who don’t exist. There have been a whole bunch of support programs and loan schemes developed in the last few years, really good ones that will do a lot, but the problem is they all require official identification. As it stands now anybody without a birth certificate (and thus without an ID card) has to go through a costly process that could take years to finish to get one, putting the instruments of opportunity out of reach. What we’re hoping to do is get the names of every worker (about 500 total in the commune) who needs an ID card and then lobby the departmental tribunal to set up a special session in Tchaourou to process these people – doing as much of the background work as possible beforehand and take away as many excuses as possible.

Jaren too is doing very well, concentrating now on a local nutrition project with the local porridge (bouille) and the women who sell it. Bouille is a simple cream-of-wheat-like porridge that has absolutely no nutritional value to it other than simple calories. This project will introduce to the community an enriched version with more proteins and vitamins (with all local ingredients found year-round) to help reduce Kwashiokior, a form of protein deficiency. She’s got a test group lined up and is going to start next week with them to teach the recipe and the marketing necessary to sell it. She’s also helping Steve a lot with his projects, a necessity considering his French has its (huge gaping cavernous) weak spots.

However, most everything is in slow motion until the 16th when GWBush shows up to launch his malaria initiative and greet the Cotonou-based Peace Corps volunteers (not we northerners, sadly). Nonetheless, we persevere.

Most importantly, the baseball project is coming along. We’ve actually been using an old copy of RBI Baseball 4 for Sega Genisis to teach the kids the general rules and game flow, which also gives Steve the opportunity to try to pronounce “Incavilia” with a French accent. All in all the baseball has been our favorite project here and hopefully we can keep it going.