It's going well here, though I've been in a slight amount of a funk the last week or so - probably because of all the excitement of the previous weeks! Not bad to have a slow week, now and then. Still, higher gears can and will be reached. We've already started actually, though it's been raining a lot recently and that has a way of...sloooowwwwwinnnggggggg things down.
Anyway, I'll try to cram a bunch into this one, so bear with me.
After the training in the city, I rushed back for the Pikin Slee event of the decade - the Museum grand opening party. The Museum really is the crown jewel of Saramacca land, as I've taken to calling it. I would say it's a solid step above a small town museum to antique farming/random famous guy/whatever battle was fought there - which is pretty impressive given the context. The rastas built it from the ground up and they did a good job.
They did not, however, do it alone and that was evident at the party. Basically everybody that was at the training conference (counterparts, organizations, etc) was at the party. Probably close to 500 people for a 3 day event. Food, drinks, live music, traditional dancing, spectator sports, community sports, and even a movie! A documentary about Pikin Slee made this past July.
I generally helped, networked, and soaked up free stuff as much as possible. What I didn't do was sleep very much, but what can you do. It was an awesome event - by far the most impressive thing I've seen in Suriname. Not only did they create an awesome product, but they threw a great party to celebrate it. It was a lot of money on celebration.
At first, that made me feel a bit off. But, the more I thought about it, the more it made me realize just how worth celebrating this accomplishment really is. And the celebration helps bring attention to it - for the people that did it and for everyone else to realize they can do it to. And that's pretty important here. Still, 6 ministers of government (including the VP), numerous television and other news media (I even did a brief radio interview), and a helicopter. Yes, there was a helicopter.
In short, it was so good it was almost depressing. Combined with the Captain's idea that our first project has to be a solar panel for every household in Pikin Slee, I was feeling a bit overwhelmed. I will probably never throw an event that good as a Peace Corps Volunteer. The budget for that party had to be larger than the average Peace Corps project. Needless to say, a solar panel in every house is also a bit out of scope - that's 1000+ panels at US$1000+ a pop.
So I felt a bit lost for a few days. But then a couple of things happened to help me out. The first was doing the other 2/3s of my job - getting out and talking to people. Because, as you'll see if you read my report, people here haven't actually been talking to me about a solar chicken in every pot. It's about more basic infrastructure stuff.
Oddly, water has kind of fallen off the map (I've heard rumors of a government project that was abandoned a few years back being restarted), but fixing the jetties that are the village's access points to the river is bubbling up. And so I did my best to Peace Corps the problem. Afterall, it isn't my job to do development projects here - it's my job to help the village develop themselves. And that means dialogue. Organization. Committees. Bureaucracy! About the only benefit of bureaucracy I can think of is that it makes it tough for one person to set a radical agenda.
So I spent the next week or so working on starting all the groups I've been saying I might start. Not just because of the solar panel thing, of course, but that is certainly a factor. So now I have an English Group, a Youth Group, a Pre School group kind of randomly formed and I jumped in with it, and I'm getting ready to start the Business Group. I've also convinced the Captain and several other key players that we need to start a Development Steering Committee to talk about larger projects (like solar power for the entire village or jetties or water). Not much has happened with that one yet, but the agreement is there.
So I'm excited about the prospects. I'll get into the other two reasons in my next post. But I want to briefly digress, as I do so often, into a discussion of radical ideas. The museum was a radical idea. I just found out that my captain here (I've only got one Captain and it's Paul) won some international award for his advocacy for native land rights here in Suriname. His name is Wanze and I haven't googled it yet, but apparently it's kind of a big deal.
So should I really be stepping on the big dreams of a village and it's leaders that have actually achieved some big things? Their winning some of those land rights in the international courts right now. The last thing I want is to stand in the way of a vision. And Evan likes to aim big. Why not aim for solar power? I mean I can see ways that it might happen. But I don't think that's the best use of PCV-me's resources. Something that big is political and Captain Wanze has political clout - or at least is working on it base on that award and the direction the court case is taking. I'm here to help improve the daily standard of living.
Incremental improvement is what I did for the last 4 years. It isn't as much fun as dreaming of 24x7 green power. But I don't think that's the way I'm going to rock people's world here. There are other ways, and you'll read about them in the next post!
radical agenda - but they can!
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