My work cont.

So here is a quick rundown of what has been happening in my organization and in my head since I finished with my fist home visits.

First I came to realize that the whole first 2 months at site I was making lots of notes about problems I perceived and solutions I could provide to them. By the end of October I realized that this was totally the wrong approach. It is ironic because I knew from the start that the way that aid agencies and orgs have made big mistakes in the past is when some guy from the west shows up, thinks he knows better than everyone else and then creates a project based on his own assumptions rather than the self identified needs for those in the community. So after doing a lot of thinking and reading (particularly two very good books which I recommend. "Mountains beyond Mountains" and "Pathologies of Power", the first is a biography of a Man named Paul Farmer and the second is a book written by Paul Farmer) I decided that I needed to start from the beginning by conducting a community needs assessment or CNA. Basically it is just a tool to figure out what the biggest problems are for a group of people. But I had a lot of questions about the details and how to go about it as there are many different types of CNAs. Most importantly, would the CNA be for my activistas, the neighborhood in general that the office was located in, or directly for the HIV positive people that my org already was providing services to? Thankfully I had my reconnect meeting coming up, so when I arrived in Maputo I had a list of questions to ask my Peace Corps supervisor. After a really good session of sitting down with her I decided that I would focus the CNA on the individuals that were living with HIV in the surrounding neighborhoods in which my organization operated.

After a lot of time spent back at site trying to get something off the ground and a lot of frustration, I held a couple in prompt to CNA with all the activistas after one of their normal meetings. I asked them if there was one problem that their "patients" had in their lives that was common amongst all of them and was very serious. The answer was the same amongst all of them. The people in our area who are HIV positive don’t have enough food to eat and also don’t have money to pay for transportation to go to the hospital to pick up their antiretrovirals or even to get to the hospital if they have a serious health problem. I realized that CNAs are really more important for outsiders to understand what is going on in a community than the people themselves. The activistas knew what the main problem was and have for some time. First I focused on food. I said to myself, ok we have Identified the problem and now I have to figure out a solution. At first I was really excited about developing some form of food security project, but then the real world happened.

My org got a surprise visit from one of its large American donor organizations. They got all the activistas together and held a big meeting that was for me very awkward. It was very hierarchical and obviously intimidated the activistas, therefore it was not very useful in my personal opinion as an independent observer. Next, a couple of the activistas took some of the representatives from the donor org on some home visits and I went with one group. This was a very depressing experience for two reasons. First, the people we visited were living very hard lives. The first person was a very sweet soft spoken 10 year old boy who was blind in one eye and also HIV positive. The second was a single mother of two who was working 3 house cleaning jobs and barely making enough money to feed her children. The third was a man who was extremely skinny and suffering from something that cased him to walk with a serious limp. The second reason this was all so depressing was because I realized that the plots of land that these people lived on were very very small. They had no chance of being able to grow any significant amount of food in the small patch of sand that their entire family called home.

So I was back at square one, I knew that food was a big problem, especially because HIV positive people need to eat more calories than uninfected people. (Also the antiretroviral drugs hurt peoples stomachs when they are not taken with food, so it is very common that people will not take their meds when they do not have food. This causes an individual to take their meds irregularly which in the long run is even worse than not taking them at all because it increases the chances of creating a drug resistant strain of HIV, which puts the individual and possibly other in much greater risk.) However, I had no clue as to what the solution was and this was extremely frustrating for me so I reached out to some people at the Maputo peace corps office and had some good conversations with them. The country director just so happened to stop by that week for a routine visit, so it was good to run things by him. He validated my frustrations, validated the fact that I live in a very rural spot and also validated that I was doing good work, he also gave me some cheese and dark chocolate from Maputo, so that was very cool. Also I talked the whole thing over with my mom and that helped me get everything organized in my brain. Basically the end result was me realizing that it was my responsibility to help my org find a solution and improve itself but it was the responsibility of the org to actually find the solution, implement a program and “help the people.” This was a big relief as it took the responsibility of having to "save" the whole community of HIV positive people in my area off my shoulders and gave me a better perspective of what my role should be over my period of time here. So I came to the conclusion that my main responsibilities were that of a teacher and a question asker.

I have started out just teaching things that people told me they wanted to learn and then moved on to asking questions about problems and then asking if people wanted me to teach them something I thought could help them. I started giving computer classes to people in the office and a few have really gone from 0 to 100 (well maybe 75 but 75 is 100 in Mozambique). I sat down and helped a colleague make a December calendar of events for the acvtivistas. Right now in the office everything is organized by word of mouth and there is no official calendar or any list of upcoming meetings or activities in the office. So helping people in the office get calendars up has been a small but important project that they have really responded to. I felt really proud when my colleague came into the office one morning and put up a calendar she made on her own the day after I taught her how to do it. I also gave a class to some colleagues and activistas on how to conduct a CNA so that in the future they could go out and do it on their own. So at the next activista meeting they did a CNA with all the activistas (it was basically the same thing I had done and we got the same answers but this time they were doing it, which is the whole point, so that was good.) After everyone had spoken I raised the question as to what they thought the solution should be. I also asked a lot of random questions about stuff that I thought may be possible solutions, and it probably all seemed like stupid questions to them  but it got them thinking about what things could work and what things could not work. By the end of the meeting they decided that the best thing to do would be to organize all their "patients" into groups according to what neighborhood they lived in so they would not have to travel far to see each other. Each group would have an income generating project that they would work on together. Each group would have a project that was best suited to their skills, resources, and abilities. So hypothetically one group in a more urban area would make clothes while some in a more rural area would grow pineapples, and another would raise pigs etc...

So that is more or less where I am: trying to keep them at the lead, finding the solutions on their own. Now I need to just keep asking them questions about how they think it would be best to more forward and what are the next steps. So that is my plan. I think....