I discussed with like minded friends and family my dream for doing development work on this trip to Senegal, and possibly staying on if all went well. So I wanted to give my final informal treatise on that subject. I have become consumed with the subject of West African development for the past 8 years. My development philosophies have been largely influenced by my Peace Corps service in Mali and by my wife Ngone (from Senegal).
The ultimate test of a development project is its sustainability. All projects start with a good idea, but most end failing the critical test of sustainability, maybe either because the local people could not afford needed repairs or the priorities of the local community did not match those of the donor community who installed the project. As I learned in Peace Corps training these failed projects are littered across the landscape of West Africa, in the form of broken well pumps, empty school buildings, health centers with no maintenance or equipment, etc. Over the years I have come to believe that the entire concept of development is largely unsustainable. The idea that foreign aid or capital will start a project sets up an expectation gap that the project can only materialize or continue properly with outside aid and/or advice. A current example is a Peace Corps Volunteer we met in Dakar this time around who managed a USAID-funded garden to provide "sustainable" nutritition to patients at the AIDS clinic of the hospital. The garden was surviving with continued doses of funding, but it was a very expensive garden, and the volunteer observed a lot of funding going to waste, not confident how it will do after he leaves. The volunteer decided to start his own garden with no funding in the psychiatry ward of the hospital, which received no USAID or outside funding "because it's not AIDS-related". He built the raised garden beds with used tires. And his garden was doing almost as well as the expensive one built with foreign aid. This volunteer's approach is similar to mine. I find it very troubling to engage in the imperfect top-down development process, and choose instead to look for home-grown endeavors.
To give you an idea of the development work I pursued on this trip, I visited many water and sanitation NGOs in Dakar. I met with the directors of USAID and Peace Corps, and also with officials of those organizations. I attended a water and sanitation conference and spoke with various NGOs, Senegalese government agencies, European and Senegalese engineering firms. A German engineering firm interviewed me about representing them on a proposal in Mauritania. But they ultimately decided not to submit a proposal. They had a German educated Senegalese engineer representing them in Senegal but had not yet won any projects in Senegal (not a good sign for my engineering prospects). I have also conducted research by internet and telephone over the past few years with contacts in Senegal and Mali. What I have gathered is that a lot of the international funding for water and sanitation projects has shifted to the more remote regions, such as Mali and Niger. See for example the
West Africa Water Initiative. I spoke with the World Vision director for this project and he told me they had constructed hundreds of bore holes across Senegal over many years. His NGO has now found local Senegalese, Malian, etc engineers to do their water work for much lower salaries than American engineers. I met some Americans who work for NGOs and they told me I could expect a salary of about $1,000 per month to start. Over a year or two I could work my way up the ladder to a better salary. This cumulative research added together with the rapidly increasing cost of living in Dakar led me to decide that we should not stay in Senegal for the long-term. But instead we should focus on the rural projects we had started, including our house in Ngone's village and building on our land on the beach outside Mboro. But also small grassroots projects in those regions. This work is not going to save the world but is something our family can do. We have already provided assistance for annual school tuition fees for our nieces, keeping all the young girls in school, and have sent money for prescriptions and hospital visits when people get seriously ill. This has been relatively small amounts of money, less than we spend on gas. For example annual schools fees are about $40. A hospital visit is usually around $30 or $40.
One last day of idealism:
Ngone's brother Abibou is a master plumber and Uncle Jig Jum has worked with numerous missionaries and NGOs over the years, especially the Dutch missionaries in Ngone's village. After visiting the missionary with Aissatou's children in Thies we were all feeling especially inspired. We set out one day early in the morning to visit a couple water NGOs in Thies who develop water projects with international funding. I had drilled Jig Jum to identify the most remote, desperate village in the Serere-Safin region without water. He told me of Thouly, an especially remote village where they really need help with water. The women walk 5 to 10 kilometers each way to get water and their groundwater table is very deep (upwards of 30 or 40 meters). So we went to Eau Vive (Living Water) and L'eau pour tout l'Afrique (Water for all of Africa) in Thies. When we walked into Eau Vive the receptionist offered us a seat and we explained who we were. Jig Jum had come to their office the previous day and waited 4 hours to speak with someone who told him to come back the next morning with me. The receptionist explained that this person had traveled to another region and that the other engineers were "out of the office." We explained the situation in Thouly and she said they received a request for funding from Thouly a couple years ago. Jig Jum was familiar with Thouly's previous efforts and discouragement. She told us there are all kinds of villages who have requested funding and their NGO evaluates all requests, but there's a lack of available funding. She said to come back next week. Discouraged, we left. I said, "here I am the American asking for funding and they're looking at me like I'm the one whose supposed to be providing the funding." We went to L'eau pour tout l'Afrique (Water for all of Africa). The office was closed and a little girl said the guy who works there is gone. (Guess he's out getting that water for Africa. It's easy to get discouraged doing this type of work in Africa but I had seen this all before during my two years in Peace Corps. Every office I went to, it was always "come back next week." I've grown awfully tired of the symbiotic system of patronage and powerlessness. I believe the only solution is the "
third way." My brother Abibou is a great example of the skilled labor force in Africa that is slowly and surely developing the continent to a high standard. These energies are channeling themselves into successful small entrepeneurizm all over the continent, with minimal capital. Abibou now seeks out free lance plumbing work after initially working as an apprentice with no pay for many years.)
We then went to the Government's Regional Direction of Hydraulics, which Jig Jum had been told the previous day we needed to visit before doing any water project in the region. We found five men sitting under an overhang in the shade and a machine shed with one old dead front end loader. We parked and walked to the main office, but there was no one there. There were a couple computers on dusty desks with covers over them. Two elderly men on the porch greeted us warmly and offered us tea. We walked back around to the parking lot and found a back building again with a covered computer on a dusty desk, but with a back air-conditioned office with a government official shuffling papers on his desk and gruffing at an underling. He curtly offered us a seat and listened to us. He began to understand the situation in Thouly and said drilling a well and putting up a small water tank would cost $50,000 to $100,000 or more. He said like everybody else there's not enough funding. I think he might of even mentioned something about the President's other priorities but I can't remember. I said there's no way I can collect that kind of funding from church groups in the United States. He said the Director was at a meeting today and would be back the next day, and that we should come back to get his advice. I decided it wasn't worth it to drive all the way back to Thies when chances are he'd be at another meeting or "out of the office." Jig Jum, Abibou, and I passed by the missionary again to get our spirits up with some young African smiles and evangelical prayer circles. We decided not to visit Thouly after all. Jig Jum said the rock and dirt road to get there could possibly be impassable in my Camry. Ngone had warned me that if I showed up in that village they'd think God had come to them and then when God did not deliver they would say it was because of the daughter of Fatou Diouf (Ngone's mother). She said to be very careful not to promise them anything. So on the way back I said if we can't do a water supply project maybe we can do an irrigation/agriculture project. Jig Jum and Abibou thought it was a great idea and Jig Jum took us to a very remote village, called Sipan, where a missionary had helped install a reservoir and pipe from the well. The villagers grew tomatoes, eggplants, okra, and other vegetables in a large field. But the elders told me the young people don't help them water the plants, so even though they're supposed to water in the morning and the evening, they only water every evening, it's just too tiring. Standing out there in the middle of nowhere under the oppressive afternoon sun I could believe it. Most of the young people work in Dakar so the village contains just the elderly, women and children. I could tell the plants were thirsty and could really produce more with that morning water.
We talked about developing a project like this in Ngone's village. There is a rich tradition of agriculture but it has all now almost completely been abandoned with all the young people focused on working in Dakar during the week and only coming back to the village on the weekends. From discussing the project idea in detail I came to realize that each family would be more focused on their own benefit than the traditional communal approach. I think the future of agriculture in this region is inevitably going to be on a capitalist model, for better or worse. I'd like to buy the mango orchard next to our village house and develop it into a farm and hardware/plumbing shop. There's another villager trying to develop his own farm on some family land. He recently put in a well and is getting his farm in order "little by little," ("danka danka" in Wolof, "doni doni" in Bambara) as all across Africa.
As for water supply, piped water has made its way to the more accessible villages including Ngone's village. And 10 to 20 km away are the suburbs of Dakar with new subdivision developments with piped water and sewers. The suburbs are rapidly expanding. The new international airport is being built 5 km further out from Ngone's village. All that nearby modern development is the future of water for this part of Africa. But it's also plenty obvious that the villagers will continue to guard their traditional ways, at least as a back-up plan, as they construct and adopt modern lifestyles.
