This entry is the story of my first funded PC project. Before I get too far though, I should preface with this background information... Last year in one of my grad school classes that was specifically designed to prepare for PC my professor walked into the room, turned on the projector, and put up a slide that said, "Every village has a son of a bitch. Your job is to find out who that person is.".
My first PC project is a combination of hand pump repair and soak pit construction. The hand pumps are India/Mali Mark II and are about 20 years old. I think they were put in back when the Malian government was involved in a massive pump installment campaign funded by the World Bank. There are four pumps in my village. One was broken when I arrived. One broke in January.
To paint a better picture, the hand pumps are really important for the village. Most people have a hand-dug well in their compound or nearby, but many of these wells go dry during the hot season. Also, these wells are not lined or protected from contamination, so the water from them is often not safe if not treated... which no one does here. The hand pumps go much deeper into the shallow aquifer in the area, thus providing a constant source of water throughout the year and the water at these pumps is also much safer to drink.
If you don't know what a soak pit is... its basically a big, covered hole that water drains to so that it can soak into the ground without being a nuisance to the public in the process. A lot of people do their laundry at the pumps, and there is always water spilled when people fill buckets, which results in large pools of standing water next to the pumps. The soak pits are being built to get rid of this water to help "clean up the streets". (For those of you who care, the "soak pits" for this project are actually small drain fields that use a sand backfill and perforated pipe because the soil in my area has consolidated clays and a high groundwater table.)
As I said, when I arrived in my village in September 2009 one of the pumps was already broken. When the second one broke in January 2010 the village and I decided to remedy the situation. After several meetings with key village members we came up with a plan. The village would pay to have a pump repairman come from Dioro to look at the pumps and provide an estimate of the cost for repairs. I would then write a grant proposal to PC for money to fix the pumps and buy materials for the soak pits. The village would contribute some money for the pumps and labor and materials for the soak pits.
When the pump repairman came in late January he was able to assess the situation pretty quickly. He was even able to fix the pump that had been broken since I had arrived. Turns out a $0.25 link for the pump chain was missing. The repairman fixed the problem on the spot. This is something the guy in my village that is in charge of the pumps (pump tigi) could have fixed on his own... but he didn't. I asked the repairman if he would disassemble the whole pump to make sure the actual water lifting mechanism (piston) was in good shape, but he told me that since the pump was now lifting water everything was fine. He didn't need to take everything apart.
Then, when it came time for the repairman to get paid the pump tigi told me to pay. I said that the village agreed to pay for this (meaning the pump tigi). After a bit of "back and forth" the pump tigi finally paid the repairman, but not before I was pretty annoyed.
After the repairman left I had more meetings with my village counterpart, the village chief, the pump tigi, and other key persons in the village. I laid out a plan for fixing the pumps, building the soak pits, and how we were going to pay for all of it. Everyone signed off so I went to Segou, wrote a project proposal, submitted it to PC, and waited for the funds to show up from USAID about five weeks later.
During the waiting period we had a little work to get done. The village agreed to contribute the rest of the money needed to pay for the pump repairs. They did not have the cash readily available for this. The plan was for my work counterpart and the pump tigi to go ask each household that used the pumps for money to pay for the repairs. I expected to encounter some problems with this, so for two weeks before the pump repairman was scheduled to come back I asked my counterpart if they had collected the money. At first the answer was "We'll collect it tomorrow". Then after a while the answer was "Yes"... for several days in a row.
A few days before the pump repairman was scheduled to return my counterpart told me the pump that had been fixed during the repairman's first visit was broken again. When I went to examine it, it felt as though part of the pump cylinder was broken... something the repairman did not look at during his first visit because "everything was fine". The next day I went to Segou to get the PC funds to buy pump parts and soak pit materials.
When I returned to village I discovered that some preliminary work that the pump tigi was supposed to have done before the repairman came back was not finished. This delayed the repairman's arrival by a day.
The day the repairman finally came started off well enough. It was a cloudy morning, so it stayed cool longer than usual. While waiting for the repairman to arrive I overheard my counterpart asking everyone he encountered for money to fix the pump. Obviously the money he said was on hand to pay the repairman was not, in fact, on hand. I didn't worry too much though as it has his problem for not collecting the money beforehand despite a two week barrage of interrogation by myself.
While waiting I also went all over town making sure things were ready and that all the pump parts were accounted for. (When we took the pump apart to look at it we never put it back together and stored everything at someone's house). I discovered that some important bolts were not with the rest of the parts. When I asked the pump tigi about these he told me I needed to buy new bolts. I asked where the old ones were, but got no answer. This conversation was cut short by the arrival of the repairman.
We quickly got to work and had the first pump working again in about an hour. Miraculously the pump tigi showed up with the bolts I had asked him about... I could tell that he had come from his house. My guess is he wanted to keep them for himself.
When we had finished work on the first pump I told the repairman that the pump he had previously fixed was broken again. He agreed to take a look at it, so we went across town and took it apart. We discovered that the pump cups inside the cylinder had come unscrewed (this is unusual). No parts had failed. They had just come undone.
After tightening everything up and putting everything back down the well borehole we discovered that the plunger was not going back down after being pumped. This was a problem. Solution: disassemble the entire pump for a second time, go to the exact place where we had tightened everything, and replace two rubber pump cups that were a little "stiff".
During this process the repairman had gotten grease all over his hands from the pump chain and I had to suggest to him that he wash off his hands before handling the internal parts of a pump that provides drinking water to lots of people. Some things are just not as obvious to some as they are to others.
When we had finished, the next logical step was for the village to pay the repairman (pump tigi's job). The pump tigi told me to pay. I said that the village had agreed to pay. The pump tigi told me that the village was getting all the sand needed for the soak pits and that paying the repairman was too much... that I should pay.
I had just heard the most annoying sound in the world. The sound of a man 50 years+ complaining and refusing to do what he agreed to. This may not sound like a big deal, but in a culture where most people are illiterate, your word is your contract, and this guy was breaking the terms of our deal and essentially telling me it was my fault.
After going back and forth with this (in front of the repairman) I realized I wasn't going to get anywhere and needed to seek a higher authority. We ended up at the chief's house and interrupted a meeting he was having. The pump tigi did all the talking. Parts of the conversation I didn't understand, but at first they wanted me to pay the repairman right then and the village would pay me back a few days later. I said no deal. I told my side of the story. The chief then told the pump tigi he had to pay the repairman.
It became clear to me that the pump tigi had not collected the money needed to pay the repairman and therefore was not able to pay. It was important for me not to give in at this point, so I simply sat down and chatted with the repairman while the pump tigi went door to door to collect the money.
I was annoyed and incredibly embarrassed. The pump repairman ended up having to wait for an hour to get paid. That's not cool.
Obviously, after all this transpired I was more than a little upset with the pump tigi. He had balked at every stage of the project and tried to get me to foot the bill for things twice. Later that same day he even had the nerve to tell me that the next time I went to Segou I need to buy him new sandals. He wears size 11 incidentally. Ladies and gentlemen... I have found my village's "son of a bitch".
The worst part is I know I have to work with this guy in the future. He is an important person in the village and my counterpart hangs out with him all the time. There is no way I can avoid dealing with him and because he is much older than me I can't "bust his chops" so to speak without causing more problems for myself. I talked to my counterpart about this and told him that he needs to intervene the next time something like this happens and he agreed.
But, the good news is everything worked out. The pumps got fixed. The repairman got paid. The village paid their share. I was able to show that I can't be bullied into just throwing money at the village's problems. And... I found the son of a bitch.
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