Here Fishy Fishy Fish

I want to start this entry out by paying tribute to those prodigal sages of wisdom... Bert and Ernie. How else would generations of Americans have learned about the necessary equipment for bath time or the most effective strategies for catching fish?

Last week I spent a few afternoons and an evening at my "site mate's" village helping to build a fish pond and soak pit. But first, to clarify, my "site mate" is in a village about 12 km from mine. She's the closest Volunteer to me, so we see each other fairly often, thus the term site mate.

The Volunteer that was at her site before her had arranged to have an Engineers Without Borders (EWB) student chapter from the University of Pittsburgh come and build a large fish pond in the village. They have visited the village a few times already, but last week was their actual implementation trip. They had an excavator and front end loader brought out from Segou to have a 120m x 30m fish pond dug in the middle of the village. It was like playing with giant toys in a giant sand box.

The point of the fish pond is to create... well... a pond to raise fish in. The village will then sell the fish at market or use it as a food source.

I'd say overall the project was a success, but there were a few snags along the way. The front end loader showed up a day late and then after a few days of work broke a large pin that prevented the machine from doing what it does best... picking up
copious amounts of soil.

Once that was fixed the translator that was working with the EWB students told us that there was a bit of a conflict in the village. Apparently the village chief and elders had approved areas of land to be dug up for the pond that other village members did not want disturbed. Fortunately this land was included in the portion of work that had been filed under "we'll get to it if we have enough time", and there didn't end up being enough time, so the land was left undisturbed. Just goes to show that community politics in Africa work the same way as they do in the US.

I ended up doing a bit of "consulting work" with the professional engineer that was with the EWB group while visiting the project and helped the group design and put together a soak pit. It ended up being a slow sand filter that drained into the fish pond, but who's really keeping track of specifics? In any case it ended up being a very "frumbling" experience.

In case you're not familiar with that term - it's a hybrid between frustrating and humbling. Frustrating because I was trying to get a bunch of unskilled village volunteers to help dig trenches, lay pipe, and move large amounts of soil and sand. They had no real concept of how the thing we were building would actually work, but still let us know that what we were doing wouldn't work. That was frustrating. So much so that after I while I just decided that everyone around me was an idiot and there was no point trying to explain anything. All I needed to do was coldly direct people to do what I wanted.

Fortunately my site mate had the presence of mind to tell me to stop being an ass-hole to her villagers and explain what was going on. This was humbling, but she was right. What's the point of doing a bunch of development work if you're not going to get the people who are using it to understand what is happening? There isn't one.

And for those would-be engineers out there... remember this fundamental truth. Water is lazy. It prefers going down hill. I'm not sure if that bit of knowledge just isn't understood as well here, or if people think they can just will the unlikely into happening, or if people are just wearing really unevenly souled shoes... but the idea of laying pipe so that water would flow though it in the desired direction took a bit of talking through.

The true test of success for this project won't come for about a year though. The water for the pond will come from the rains in a few months. There is some concern that a berm that was put in around one end of the pond will limit the amount of water that will get to it. There is also a concern about water quality. This pond will be a very tempting place for women to come wash clothes and animals to come drink. The soap from clothes washing and manure from animals could saturate the stagnant water with nutrients, which could cause algal blooms, which would result in depleted oxygen levels in the water, which would result in a poor living environment for the fishes. Only time will truly tell.