Absolutely nothing....life in Ramadan

So I write to you in the middle of the month of Ramadan where you ought not eat, sniff food, smoke, drink, or swallow saliva from sunup to sundown. Since this year, like last year, it fell during the rainy season, men and women must go out and farm in the morning. After that the men come back into village and the women...continue to work, carrying firewood and water, cooking, ordering around kids. What's more is that some women continue to fast even during breastfeeding or pregnancy, though those conditions warrant postponement of fasting according to Islamic rules. On the flipside, for those teachers back home for summer break, a day of Ramadan means doing nothing...absolutely nothing. Normally, they sit in their fada, or men's group drinking tea, chatting and maybe playing cards. But recently they've just been sitting there, and then talking a little (sometimes listening to music), and then sitting around some more. So, a few days this past week I've had the get up and go to wake up (acutally the drums do that) and prepare myself breakfast at 4 something in the morning and then not swallow anything till just after 7pm. To the end of energy conservation I've been hanging out at the teachers' fada. Knowing what to expect, I've been bringing along something to read.

One of my recent reads was The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs. In it he prescribes what he terms a 'clinical' approach to development: a steep increase in aid from wealthy countries and a much more detailed and extensive wish list of items needed for economic growth from developing countries. While his book spends a lot of time harping on the failures of the West to properly aid the poor world, and even more time describing the endless number of factors needed to make a correct diagnosis of a country's deficiencies, there still seems to be something missing. He still seems to assume that each country's central government can decide how to use money given as a lump sum from donor countries in the most efficient way possible. I have witnessed, even on a small scale, how this can go horribly wrong. As he mentions repeatedly, the third world is not inherently corrupt, yet he doesn't mention that humans don't spend gifted money in the most thrifty manner. What's more, a fleet of technocrats, no matter how large, can't possibly think of all the ways a project could go awry. In a fellow volunteer's town young girls' scholarships have gone to the richest families in the town - as opposed to poor families in bush villages - thus creating little net improvement. These girls would have already succeeded at school. In another volunteer's town, a highly-reputable NGO built a beautiful primary school with solar panels and well-equipped classrooms, while leaving a med clinic half-built (only the walls) and completing ignoring the secondary school, which has not a single classroom (only millet stalk shade hangars). In Lido, the largest building in town is a farming-supplies warehouse that has been largely vacant since the NGO that built is now defunct and the second-largest structure is a water tower with too many issues to count: poor placement, structural defects, lack of repair parts, change in managment rules at nat'l level resulting in no outside management at local level....It's not just that these projects build what are essentially gifts -with a small community contribution- it is also the fact that the village's opinion is rarely asked. Latrines were built in all the marketplaces near Lidoby a large Belgian outfit all in a few months time, including in Lido's market. Not only was Lido's placed in the far back of the marketplace, no one was informed about how to use it and when I last checked it was still locked. What's more, latrines in the bush have a history of being troublesome and expensive to take care of, and as its stinkiness worsens, villagers revert back to going #2 in the bush, as they always have.

Despite these projects failures, it sometimes feels as though my ideas have not been any better. The other day another volunteer and I were comparing the progression of our English clubs, and found them to be exactly the same: large attendance petering out to just a handful, lack of creativity and inability to respond to open-ended questions, lack of continuity to due student and volunteer absences. In other projects, villagers, despite having to pay a fee, attend and participate, consider the project to be the volunteer's - not their own. This is despite the fact that villagers come up with the ideas, if not much of the planning, for all projects. I have been working for months trying to help our tree nursery man get year-round water access: writing one proposal for a well-improvement, then trying another approach with a pump, then writing another proposal for the first idea and then organizing a women's gardening group for him to help lead (as we ought not do a project for just one person's gain but rather for the greater good of the whole village, plus both the women and the nurseryman really desired to start up gardening). Now, in the past few days, he has shown signs of flaking out; I believe it may be that he may not actually want to help out the women as much as he said he did. Even if things do work out, there's no saying that someone essential to the operation might dissappear for over three months, ruining the essential follow-up work that makes a project sustainable, as happened with our agricultural methods training and subsequent demonstration plots earlier this year. As I have noticed with my counterpart's predicament - he didn't pass a certain test to go on to become a primary teacher so he felt compelled by hunger (literally!) to go back and work in Benin and Togo as he had done for many years prior to my arrival. Leaving to Nigeria or other countries along the coast in search of work is as common for young men in Niger as going off to college is for young Americans.

Not to leave you on a sour note, there are some promising signs of development. Some aspects of development seem inevitable: every neighboring country had cell phone coverage, it's only a matter of time before Niger got it too; other driving forces of development appear 'out of thin air'. Sachs mentions India's telecommunications boom as such an event. On a small scale, where I believe Peace Corps and most individuals can do most, projects have to be launched without promising funds and without a locked-in end goal. Too much frustration can arrive from trying to turn out 20 women knitters a year when it turns out there already enough of them for their clientele; the supposed knitters might have better luck selling millet cakes on a wider turf than where they had been selling them before. Growth can easily be halted by a lack of market: Lido is a closed economy, the same people come every week with the same amount of money. People turn cash into livestock or other goods almost immediately, making investment growth only as dependable as your goat's diet. When you want to sell outside of Francophone West Africa your exchange is only as good or bad as the Euro's, lowering incentives for business expansion. I am no economist, but I can sometimes tell that the best idea may just be to pack up a bunch of goat, sheep and cow skins and jump on the truck to a big nearby market, hoping someone who can turn them into something nice and shiny will show up and pay you good cash for your stinky fare.


All the best, and happy end of August,
Thomas