Work
Finding a balance between what my community's expressed needs, my Peace Corps EAFS framework and my interests and skills is tough. Think three concentric circles with a very small area where all three overlap.
Projects that fit all three criteria are ideal - take my school garden project with my environmental club. I LOVE it, I have a great background for working with kids and gardening, it is listed explicitly on my EAFS framework, and my environmental club students and professors are the ones who came to me with the idea and desire to do it. Perfect, right? But there are also plenty of other worthy projects in my community that do not so easily satisfy all three criteria. Take the girls' soccer team, for one. I'm so excited about the appreciative inquiry process and organizational development work with AVPE, but it's hard to fit it into the three circles. Capacity building work - definitely. Totally in line with Peace Corps development philosophy and my own. EAFS-y? Only so far as it enables AVPE to be more sustainable and continue to effectively do its own work with environmental education and food security. My interests and skills? I'm super excited to help train AVPE through the appreciative inquiry process, and it matches up with some of my facilitation skills.
I still struggle with how to feel about my work here. Let's be honest - I'm not qualified to go tell farmers here how to grow food. Many of them have been working this land before I was born. Sure, when my neighbor comes over to ask about some new agroforestry technique I mentioned at the marché the other day, I'm happy to explain it. And when his wife invites me over to cook with her and then asks me about container gardening around the house, I'm happy to talk about that, too! But in between those unpredictable conversations with individuals, I want to feel like I'm doing something as well. And when these farmers spray their whole fields with herbicide to kill weeds, I am happy to explain that they are actually contributing to the impoverishment of their soil. But the reason they're using that chemical fertilizer in the first place is because twenty or thirty years ago that was the "advance" in "Western science" that would help them grow their crops better. Not that I think that alley cropping or cover cropping will be shown to be particularly dangerous in twenty years, but I don't really want to come in and tell them about the latest advance in Western agricultural science, an advance for which we may not fully understand the long-term repercussions. Unfortunately, training farmers in natural resource management is a full one-third of my EAFS project framework...
I was listening to a great Ted Talks podcast from NPR the other day, called Haves and Have Nots. One of the speakers was an Italian guy who had worked in small enterprise development in Tanzania, I think. His conception of development was connecting motivated people with the knowledge and skills necessary for them to achieve their own visions for themselves. I felt like that was a good way to look at sustainable and empowering development work - not coming into to "tell" or "train" people on "new, Western, scientific methods." And it feels nebulous and is really tough (if not impossible) to see the results of some of that work. Granted, I can demonstrate a change in knowledge at the beginning of this appreciative inquiry process with AVPE, but seeing a change in behavior will take another year or years before AVPE does this process again on their own.
That's a little different than the main idea of PACA, which is essentially working with a community to empower them with the skills and confidence to organize to achieve their own ideas for development. Try measuring empowerment. That's where those three concentric circles challenge me again - each circle has a very different standard for measuring change or impact. Peace Corps would like the numbers of men, women, boys and girls I've "trained" in one technique or another. Some of my community members will measure my impact based on whether I built a new building. Others honestly just want to see me selling soja or tchakpa every week at the marché, or to come and chat about life in America or life here.
And how do I measure the impact of my work here? I'm happy with the one morning when a teacher tells me he learned some new techniques from observing my environmental club lesson. I have a list of goals for my two years of service, and I'm happy when I feel like I'm making progress on any one of them.
And some days it's just leaving the house.