Tuesday, November 25, 2008

General Update, Labas.

Fall in Marmoucha. Summer ended. In-Service Training came and went. The leaves changed colors and fell, just like in New England. The cold creeps in more and more everyday. Less and less vegetables at souk. Going to bed earlier and earlier as the night gets longer and threatens to freeze people. Snow has come and gone twice now. It sits pretty thick up on the mountains.

6 months now since I left Ouarzazate for my current home and work is finally starting in earnest. Did a very complete survey of everything community health-related and turned it in to Rabat and the Ministry of Health, now I get to design projects around the things that we have identified as priorities. For most of Marmoucha flood relief is the name of the game. The projects are huge and run the gamut from vital infrastructure rebuilding to water source protection and erosion control to restarting income generation projects. Everyone is on board. The associations are ready to organize, the guys are ready to work, and the Ministries and NGOs are tripping over themselves to spend their foreign relief cash.

I am in the middle of all of this wearing many different hats. The motivator. The expectation lower-er. The erosion expert. The hydro-engineer. The cartographer. The accountant. The botanist. The microbiologist. All laughable.

Everyday I field requests and end up just directing one person to another. I am so surprised how little impetus it takes to get people moving. I just connect people with other people. Little people who need big people to get their needs met and big people who need little people to work, but neither know where to find the other.

It also surprises me how willing people were going to be to just sit their and feel sorry for themselves. I feel like if I wasn’t their to get them going and help them analyze their needs, they would just endure it and mope. The meetings that I have assembled were not going to happen without my impetus, yet when they got together people treated the projects like they needed to happen right now. I really wonder how long it would have taken for people to get the ball rolling to solve their own problems. Maybe a year, two, or never.

Nonetheless I am not going to have the problem that some PCVs have; not enough work. Along with the big ticket projects that need grant proposals and large-scale coordination are the little projects. Monday is a Ministry of Education meeting about staffing issues. Wednesday is my youth soccer tournament and trash clean-up. The week after half of Talzemt will begin their first health education lessons in primary schools with me teaching. Two weeks after that the other half begins. In a month I will be running a constant circle of six schools with 25-40 students each with health lessons that will probably take me all the way through May 2010 with only Summer 2009 and Ramadan as a break. Huh