A Lesson Learned

I've been getting worried lately - more worried than usual. The past week and a half we have been sequencing all the little pieces of work that we are going to be doing for our projects. This is the last step in planning and very important because if we don't know what order to do all the work in, we could end up wasting quite a bit of time and money. Sequencing is by far the most difficult thing I have had to teach yet. It involves some pretty abstract logical diagramming. The participants are very intelligent, but not accustomed to thinking abstractly. Their strengths are in thinking about concrete and practical subjects. But that doesn't mean that they can't learn it, just that it will take longer than I thought. I was much too optimistic about how long it would take anyway. I had to remind myself that when I learned sequencing a year ago in graduate school it took us nearly two months to get through the material. And here I am trying to cram it into one week.

 

This week has proven to be the week of transition weather-wise also. It has been sprinkling from time to time for the past month, but this past week we've seen our first real storms. It's been so long since I've seen lightning. Each bolt seems to be colored. It's hard to say for sure; lighting bolts don't lend themselves to examination. The rain of these real storms doesn't play around like the rain of the previous light storms. It's serious rain, falling as fast and hard as it can in a nearly constant sheet, as though an lake that had been suspended above us spontaneously decided to fall. The noise of a lake hitting the roof of the school couldn't be much louder. If you have ever tried to have a conversation next to a waterfall, you can imagine the difficulty of teaching when a lake is falling on the roof of the building you are in.

 

Many people get sick during the change of seasons, so in addition to this last step of planning taking longer than I thought it would, many of the participants have been absent due to sickness. Others have been absent because of the rain or because they were sewing their seeds in their fields. This week just happened to be the week of food ration distribution. Some of the participants are either involved in the distribution or receive rations, for which they have to wait around literally all day until their name is read. Such low attendance rates for this crucial and difficult point in the workshops worries me.

 

What worries me the most is the short amount of time we have to implement the women's project. They want to make loans of fertilizer to farmers in the community, which the farmers would eventually pay back in bags of the crop they cultivated - primarily corn. Most people planted their corn four or five days ago, meaning that if they are going to use fertilizer they will need it by November 20th, just eleven days from now. We will need at least three days to finish sequencing. Only then can we start implementing the project, which will leave us eight days. I am really nervous about rushing this, especially considering that during the focus groups people said one of the problems were that many people didn't know how to use fertilizer because few people had ever used it. I can easily picture us rushing to get the fertilizer, giving it to people, and them misusing it because they were not carefully trained in how to apply it, resulting in low crop yields. They would not benefit from an improved harvest and would have no way to pay back the loan. The business would fail almost as soon as it began.

 

But if we don't buy the fertilizer in time for people to use this year, there won't be much we can do to help them improve their harvest this year. We will have to wait until next year to make an impact on their harvest. People would be hungry again for the coming year. So it's a question of whether we want to increase the risk of failure in order to make an impact immediately as opposed to waiting a year. It's hard. There is a possibility that it could succeed this year, so I don't want to give up hope completely. But are we willing to sacrifice helping people for several years in the future to try to help them this year? What would the costs be of not starting this year? Would anyone die who may not have if we had started this year? How many children won't be able to go to school again next year?

 

I am going to tell the women my concerns and ask what they want to do about it. If they still want to start this year, I'm going to recommend that we meet more often in the coming week than we usually do. I really wish I had started a month or two earlier. But there's nothing to do about that now. Just put it on the old "lessons learned" list, and don't make the same mistake again.