Kate used to live in a house like the one on the right
her new house is more like the one on the left.
Right now the cement floor of my first apartment in adulthood is littered with half finished crossword puzzles, the week in review from the last two months of weeks, all the edge pieces to a 1000 piece puzzle, about 15 books with the corners turned down and a stack of letters waiting patiently for responses. Every night I slowly work through the piles of stuff with my laptop open music playing - finishing puzzles, answering letters (I am trying I swear!) and catching up on what is happening in the world – surrounded by things from home I sometimes forget that I am indeed living in Niger. And in about twenty minutes I will climb into my mosquito net and put my headphones in- but then I will go to sleep thinking about home. That's the way the entire first month at post has been. In certain moments I forget that I am thousands of miles away from everything in my life and then in the next I will realize that I am alone in West Africa.
I have been living in my new village for just a month: spending most of my time just adjusting to being here, getting used to my various animal roommates (lizards, a bat roaches and most recently a black mouse) and learning how to do things (washing my clothes in a bucket, carrying water, cooking). And while I am adjusting (slowly) to living here, my villagers are also adjusting to having me here. When I arrived here a lot of people couldn't quite figure out what I was doing in Niger and being a Peace Corps volunteer didn't clarify things at all (I am the first volunteer in my village). I still don't think people have any idea what the Peace Corps is, but at least they have an idea of what I am doing here…kind of.
SO, an idea of what I am doing here:
Technically, I am a Municipal and Community Development Volunteer with the Peace Corps. What that means is that I work with the Mayor's office of a commune to promote the efforts of decentralization in Niger. And what that means is that I am trying to help the Mayor's office be able to do its job. Because the concept of decentralization is new to Niger, and the commune system also just out of the packaging, there are still a lot of kinks in the new government organization. The Mairie serves as the local government for the commune. Potentially the two biggest problems that this new system faces are the lack of resources available to the Mairie and the lack of knowledge about the Mairie in the community. That is pretty much where my technical job description ends.
The reality of this job description is that I won't be able to start to tackle really any part of these two problems for quite a while, if ever. And so that means for the next two years, I will spend my time first integrating and then working on projects that fit my community whether it be a community garden project, civic education, microfinance or any of the other hundred potential areas for work.
Kate Elizabeth SheerinPeace Corps Niger: July 2008-October 2010Municipal and Community Development
0 comments:
Post a Comment