So this is my first ever “blog” entry, and it's not even an authentic one as I'm just a one-time contributor to Emmys blog, but she asked me to write about the work I'm currently doing in my site so I shall do my best. My site is located in the geographic center of the country, deep in the High Atlas Mountains in a province called Azilal. My house is about 6,000 feet above sea level, and due the remote location of my village, I have spent my entire two years living with a host family. If you have seen her pictures then you know that Emmy lives in a surprisingly beautiful cement/tile house with an orange tree growing in the middle of it. I live in a three story mud house (affectionately referred to as the mud mansion) where I have a bedroom and a kitchen to myself, and the rest is shared space with the host family. While Emmy's site is quite dry, my site is a comparative water park, with rivers and natural springs in abundance, and it is because of this fact that I have had the opportunity to do some projects with potable water.
While volunteers do a number of different jobs over their two years of service, the main focus of my work has been the construction of two gravity-fed water chateaus. Essentially you find a natural spring above a village, construct a cover over it and run piping from the spring down to the village where you then construct a large cement receptacle (chateau) with a number of faucets for people to fill their water containers. Gravity does the work of a pump so the materials needed are basic and easy/inexpensive to replace if there are any problems. Using grant money that was secured through USAID, all that I had to purchase was cement, rebar, and plastic pipe. The total cost was around $3,200 and if all goes according to plan, these projects will provide clean water to over 800 people who have never had access to it before. Currently both of these villages get their water from the same rivers where they wash their clothes and let their animals graze. Needless to say that the incidence of waterborne illnesses is very high, as is the infant mortality rate. The local nurse estimates that one in every four children born in the area dies before age four (my host mother alone has lost seven children). The goal is that with clean water readily available, people will stop drinking from the river and these numbers will decrease. While this sounds pretty simple (and in theory is), there is far more work then you would think necessary involved in a project like this. In the next paragraph I will try to get a little more in depth about the process, while not being entirely self indulgent (we're the real heroes!), or boring the life out of you.
The projects began when people from each of these villages approached me with the idea. It is important, and heavily stressed by our program staff, that project ideas are community generated and not just us thinking we know what's best for everyone (perfect opportunity for American foreign policy joke, but I'll move on). After I found out where the work was needed I had to go and measure the output of the springs a number of different times. The output levels vary depending on seasons, rain, snow, etc. so it was necessary to observe the water output a number of times over the course of a year. This wasn't the most enjoyable part of the project considering both of the villages are six hour round trip hikes from my house. Hiking three hours in 100 degree sun to do 2 minutes of work, then turn around isn't tons of fun... woe is me... but I digress. The point of this is to make sure the springs produce year round, we don't want to spend $1600 on a chateau that only collects water 4 months out of the year and leaves people drinking river water the other 8. After we were confident that the springs were consistent, the next step was measuring the distance from spring to village. For this I bought a 20 meter piece of rope and had a friend help me stretch it along the ground over and over until we had our measurement. One village needed 2300 meters (1.4 miles) of pipe, and the other needed 1200 meters (¾ mile). Throughout this process I had to keep emphasizing that I would help purchase the materials needed, but that the physical labor was their responsibility, and they would not be paid for it (except for one engineer in each village who knows how to make sure the chateaus can hold all of the water pressure). The hope with this approach is that the villagers are empowered and enthusiastic about developing their communities, but do not have the money to but the materials necessary to do so. Peace Corps provides the materials, but the actual chateau and the work involved is entirely community based. After the frustratingly tedious process of working the numbers over and over into the numerous budgets and reports that USAID requires, I sent my proposal in. Two weeks later it was approved and a month after that the money was in my bank account. I picked the money up at a bank in Marrakech (where I tried to stuff 24000 Moroccan dirhams into one of those tourist money belts on my waist in front of 30 people. When you put that many bills into one of those things the ensuing bulge on your hip is essentially an advertisement to pickpockets that says “rob me, not only am I rich, but I'm clearly an idiot as well”) and three days later paid the hardware store owner in a village 24 kilometers from my site for all of the materials needed. Two days after that the materials were delivered to the central market town in my site and three days after that people from the first village arrived to start transporting the materials out to their village. This was a hilarious scene as they brought 39 donkeys and mules to transport everything. Seeing these animals poked, prodded, and loaded down with hundreds of pounds of cement, all while maintaining that stoic dignity that only donkeys possess was quite something. The next day the second village picked up their materials and the hard part of my job was finished. This was a month ago and all of the big work is out of my hands now.
This past week I visited both villages on back to back days (which was terrible scheduling on my part and proved to me that being skinny doesn't mean that I'm in shape, but that I probably just don't eat enough) to see how the work was coming. One village was already well underway digging trenches for the pipe, while the other village was in need of some motivation so I lied and said that if the work wasn't finished before May that I would take the materials back ( a bluff that in hindsight seems absurd as it took them 39 donkeys to get the stuff out there and I don't even own one). I don't know if they believed me but they assured me they would start two days later, and since the engineer gets half of his payment now and half once the project is completed I am confident the work will get done.
So that is what I have been doing with my Peace Corps service. I can't stress how lucky I am that I have a sight with water readily available and to have had people in my community who wanted to work with me. This is not a common scenario in Morocco and my actual workload was minimal compared with volunteers who actually have to search for work, i.e. Emmy ( and I write this with complete honesty and sincerity, not just for brownie points). Peace Corps has been incredibly challenging, and I was handed a project. I can only imagine the difficulties of having had to find work on my own. Thanks for reading this, I hope it has been at least mildly informative and/or entertaining.
- Doug Phillips
