Meeting I with the Water Association

Today, our final day of CBT 2, we met with the president of the association and the host brother to A**, one of my CBT-mates (who refers to him as el presidente). A** had told us that the Water Association was satisfied with their success in bringing drinkable tap water to our village – a fascinating story in itself – and that they were ready to expand their horizons. This sounded good to us, so we met with el presidente to see what they had in mind. (And because we wanted to meet with our village's only association just on general principles.) El presidente told us that the Association had a few ideas for the benefit of our village. Their favorite was buying a mill, to grind wheat into flour. There is a small mill in town already, but it doesn’t meet the needs of the village, and they’re tired of going to the next town over to get their wheat ground up. Unfortunately for us, building a wheat mill is an enormous endeavor that’s *well* beyond the scope of the week and a half we have left in the village. The other idea they liked reminded me of the Heifer Foundation, an awesome organization. They had petitioned the Ministry of Agriculture to give the poor families of our village either very valuable goats, which they could breed and sell, or else olive trees, which they could harvest as a cash crop. The goat idea sounded interesting, until H** told us that a single goat would be about 75% of our budget. Oops.

Tree planting, though, is a tried and true Peace Corps Environmental activity, and one which we’d already been thinking about. When el presidente said that it was something that his organization was interested in, we perked right up.

Exciting things are afoot at the Circle K..