Don't Cry Over Spilt Milk

I’ve returned to Sevare on well-related business, but this time with a much better outlook and a fuller arsenal of options at my disposal. My meetings that I spoke about in my last post have provided me with some promising leads for finishing the valley well. It would not be possible to implement them until after my departure, but I could at least get all of the paperwork taken care so that everything is in place to get the job done in a few months time. My country director has also provided me with a contact that may be a more immediate solution to the problem – I’m keeping my fingers crossed – and I owe her an apology. I thought that she was underestimating the situation and not doing what she could to help remedy the problem, but I was quite wrong, and I am grateful to know that she supports me and values the work that I am doing.

And the most exciting tidbit…the garden well is almost done! I know, I’m sure it seems hard to believe after the last post that things could turn around so quickly – I’m a little baffled myself. But Mandoli has been given a little gift in all of this nonsense. The estimates that the three well contractors provided were for a depth of between 15 and 25 meters. So after the last well, I anticipated 30 at best. But apparently I just needed to get my miserable butt out of village, because as soon as I did, they hit water at only 7 meters! The work has still been a mess. (Case in point: yesterday before leaving village, the masons said that they were not going to go to work because the village hasn’t been giving them enough milk powder [the village is responsible for room and board]. I asked my homologue if this was true and he said that they haven’t been able to find any milk in days. I thought this seemed a little far-fetched, but when I arrived in Sevare and went to the store to by my own milk powder [to replace the bag that I gave to the masons to pacify them], I found out that there is a critical milk shortage in Mali right now! I can’t wait to go back to village and tell the masons. These are not life-threatening setbacks, but they are annoying, and they happen everyday. More serious problems include the fact that the drilling machine we rented didn’t work for 15 of the 33 days we had it.) The well has taken far more time than it should have, but there is an end in site, and I see it every morning when I arrive at the worksite to watch the men shovel an increasing number of buckets of water out of the well so that they can dig. Everyone is ready for this to be done, and they are understandably exhausted, but the energy of the workers increased 30 fold once they started getting their feet wet.

This good fortune all coincided nicely with the Deputy Director’s visit, as she had the opportunity to see the work going on, and share in the excitement that the village felt over this part of the project’s near completion. While we didn’t hike down into the valley, we did have a chance to look out over the worksite, and she got a perspective for the importance of the valley well by looking at the location of the spring in relation to the village. She could appreciate the urgency of the village to see this job finished, and she assured me that this was something that would indeed get done. To round out her visit, she watched the women’s association make an ameliorated porridge, and they presented her with a package to take home (which she said she would prepare for the senior Peace Corps staff upon her return – I hope they like it ). I really enjoyed her visit, and it went a long way in reminding me why I signed up for Peace Corps in the first place. Of course it was inevitably going to be a feel-good PR visit, but I was so impressed by the reception that the village gave (everyone came out to welcome her and chant “peace corps, peace corps [which sounded more like “peeds cop, peeds cop”, but once I translated the DD was quite pleased]), including representation by the mayor, the police commissioner and a traditional hunter shooting off guns, that I realized that Mandoli does see the benefit of working with Peace Corps. So I let go of a little of the anxiety that I had been gripping onto so tightly for the past few months. I’ll release the rest of it once I know that we have this horrible milk problem under control.


Attacking the rock with a sledgehammer


Inserting dynamite into the bore holes dug by the drilling machine


Deputy Director's visit: (l to r, top row): Sumba Arama (my current homologue); me; Country Director Kateri Clement; Deputy Director Jody Olsen; Mayor Dibo; Hassimi Arama (village chief); Police Chief Coulibaly (bottom row): Hamadoun Arama (my former homologue); Police Commissioner with a bag of porridge and my baby neighbor Salifu