Village Care International
April 8, 2007
Report:
If you read the last report I sent, then it still holds, however, I went to Dukaw and Amanawa communities yesterday, just to encourage them. They are doing great and are both excited to hear of your planned visit. The work is going on, they are helping each other is such a dramatic way that you cant believe. The Amanawa community is on a VC fire. Every community is performing more than expected for beginners
Sudan
The Sudan training was great but just that the community doesn’t seem ready to help themselves. They have seen too much of NGO's who only come and give them relief materials or who carry development projects without involving them. They have made a commitment to begin the process but it was a weak one. All we could hear them say is bring what you have for us and then we will bring what we have and help ourselves.
Perhaps this problem came because we actually never had a fair representation of the community. Most of those who attended the training are mostly old men. There was no mobilization prior to our arrival. It was at our arrival that we met the local authorities, told them about the program and they went ahead to announce to everyone who is interested to attend. We are not even sure if those who attended carry the voice of the community. We doubt this.
They all like the outcomes and practices. But again they have fundamental problems. For instance, you can’t just talk about cleanliness and bathing to a family who hardly gets a bucket of water per day. Even for us we were forced to bath once a day because of water scarcity. An approximate 95% of the children bath once a week. I wonder if some ever do it once in a month. Again you can talk about education where there is only one expensive school in the community where the school itself cannot admit up to 5% of the total school age of the community per year. I guess Eleos Project is taking serious these challenges. Another challenge is that these people are not essentially poor. They have plenty of cattle but they hate you to talk about these. They complain that there are street children who have no homes but they all take care of their cattle even house them. They give as much as 100 cows as bride price. If you have 100 cows in Nigeria you will perhaps marry 40 wives.
I believe strongly that these people need help but whether or not we are able to come out with the best approach not to make them dependant is something i cannot figure out now. We also looked for one man of PEACE whom we hope will lead them to a good understanding, but i must admit that we found none. All of them seem to say that we need help but none is saying that we can help ourselves by doing very little things. Again like i said this could be due to the fact that there was no consultation and mobilization prior to our arrival.
By and large we have started something and I believe if watered well we shall see the fruits in the future but right now we need a lot of patience, a lot of dealing with the culture of poverty that seem to hold this people captive and so on.
During our few days of stay there we camped, and i guess this contributed to the problem. We never felt the people, we never see them as they are, i wish we did. So this has also contributed to our inability to know the way forward. But nevertheless we struck friendship with many of the folks. An amazing people. I strongly believe that if we hold on a liitle longer we should be able to make a tremendous headway. One thing that is obvious is that they all acknowledge that they have a problem and want it solved, just that they do not see themselves as part of the solution. Rather they have this tendency of looking backward, at the effects of the war rather than looking forward to what we can all do together and make the future bright.
We have not registered children nor did we set up a committee because we felt that the climate is not ripe enough for that.
This is in brief the summary of the outing. Please feel free to ask some more incase i left out some of the things you want to hear.
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