Sustainable Developement Head First

For most of my life I've been the type of person that does more doing than planning. If I'm traveling to somewhere new I get the directions of a hostel without making a reservation and go from there. If the hostel is full I look for another. If they are all full, I sleep somewhere weird, hate myself for a night, and have a story to tell afterwords. That's pretty much how I look at life. It's sometimes the best way to do things because having no expectations and having success is much better than having expectations with little success. There are however times when planning is important and this is something that the Peace Corps is big on and something that I'm trying to force myself to do.

We have 2 years here in site and plenty of time to “capacity build” which is concept we were taught in training. We are trained to do complete community analysis' of the area including exercises to find out  what gender roles exist and the dynamic of the families. We are also supposed to be in our site for 3 months before we start any type of real work so we can gain the confidence and respect of the community. I waited about a month to start my work which was actually a long time for me. I can remember days that I had to tell myself not to do anything.

This has all come about due to a recent report that I have had to submit stating my progress in the community. I went through the four projects that I have started and explained them in some detail. If your not up to date with them here they are:

1.      Creating a new logo and packaging for the cacao and then creating a new marketing strategy to sell the packaged product in more and larger markets.

2.      Building a bike that will be hooked up to a grinder and will be able to grind cacao when demand is high. I've already worked to get two bike donations and a monetary donation for the project and found a guy to help build it.

3.      Starting a full scale cacao tour including tour guides, cacao making demonstrations, sloth viewing, and payment logistics. Business plan is in the works with my community counterpart and we will be presenting it on Sunday.

4.      Teaching English to the community

Besides this I have collected clothes donations, typed and printed out documents concerning statues in within the business group, contacted and worked with two non-profits, and made many connections on the island to sell the cacao. In my report I noted all these things and the response I got was pretty much to slow the hell down. Non of these projects are at all operational yet so slowing down doesn't seem like an option for me at this point. What does make sense and is what my boss has told me to do is get more people in the business group to do more of this work. This makes sense and I have now stepped back just a little. I feel like part of the problem here is that people are used to putting things off or taking a lot of time to do anything. They are also used to organizations, including the Peace Corps, coming here and not really doing much. I guess you can say I'm trying to make up for lost time and it hasn't been ill received. I've had people come up to me and tell me how happy they are that I'm here to help. In truth, I haven't done much yet. We are only beginning to see the plans for these projects but this is already more than anyone in the past has come up with.

I do have to note that the past volunteer helped bring cacao sales to the group which was a huge step. That said, I plan motivating them to take huge steps in that direction as well as others. The group has already been coached in how to deal with keeping books and after 25 years of aid organizations coming in I believe they can handle that aspect of it. They are also very organized and have clear definitions of roles and statues.

What we will be presenting this Sunday are things that I believe need to be cleared up before we even start. Things like where the money will go, who is going to get paid for what, and how much to charge.

I have put this all neatly into pie charts and graphs. Of course this is all up to them and changing numbers or even the entire plan is up to their discretion. I'm not even presenting this as it is always better for a respected member to present things of this nature. Some things that I have proposed in the plan that I hope for them to adopt are for profits to go towards building a library, trash cleanup, emergency health fund, and a reforestation project. I'm hoping for the best.

To sum it all up, I'm going faster than I should but I still believe that they and I are working within our capacity. Every time I see someone without shoes or eating only boiled roots for dinner I want to ratchet up my efforts, but I stop myself. I'm now realizing that going too fast will not only create an unmanageable workload for me, but could deter other projects like this from being started in the future. Sustainable development really is a science. You can't just walk in and say OK this is what you do now do it and here is some money see you later. As we are told in training, the people here have to take ownership of these things for the programs to work when I'm gone. Thank god they have Solomon is all I can say because without him, the group would just be another bunch of people sitting around talking. He also keeps me in check so I don't just say hey lets do it like this. I tell him and he says hey lets do it like this.

Of course there is so much more I can and need to talk about pertaining to the process of development and my work here but I figure one boring blog update like this a month is enough. Until then...