I have received a number of requests for information about
my school’s piggery project. Often these requests come in the form of
post-midnight anonymous phone calls which begin with strange, unsteady breathing,
followed by such complete silence that I think the call has been lost, and
finishing with a loud, bourbon-soaked voice crying, “HOW. ‘BOUT. THEM. HOGS?”
In the interest of ending these calls, I’ll give you all a quick,
just-the-facts narrative of the project’s life so far.
June 2014
My counterpart (Mr. Shakhane Thamae, as you will recall)
attended the Peace Corps Project Design & Management workshop.
August 2014
Shakhane and I held a meeting with community members to
determine what they deemed the community’s most pressing needs. The takeaway
was that we would build a piggery. I was not satisfied with how the meeting
progressed; I felt like the teachers talked too much and the community members
too little. This was not a good thing for the very practical reason that a lack
of voice might indicate a lack of interest and a lack of buy-in (as we say in
the biz), which would be a good way to sink a community project before it
launched.
October 2014
We held a second community meeting after I ran through some
of the issues I had with the previous one. Mrs. Mathapelo Makoae, my colleague
and grade 4 teacher at Matholeng, facilitated the meeting. The community
generated a list of 17 needs, then narrowed down the list with an eye towards
which needs we could practically address. Eventually, they settled on
supporting our Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVCs). Mrs. Makoae then led
them in coming up with ideas for projects which could possibly achieve this. The
community members settled on a piggery. This time, however, I felt more
confident that this was what they wanted.
December 2014
After a couple of weeks of work with Mrs. Faso, the school’s
principal, I submitted our grant application to the Peace Corps for review.
January 2015
We received some comments/suggestions to strengthen our
proposal from Peace Corps staff.
February/March 2015
I really wanted to make sure that the project would be
economically sustainable, so I spent a lot of time researching expected costs
and timetables to try and put together a projected budget for the project. This
information is not asked for in the application, which I agree seems like a
gap.
April 2015
I submitted the final application through the Peace Corps
online grant portal (a device seemingly designed to exclude host country
counterparts from involvement in the process – ask me to vent about this some
time!).
June 2015
Peace Corps concluded its presumably rigorous and
time-consuming grant review process and put a tidy sum of Maluti into my bank
account, which I withdrew and kept in a black attaché case handcuffed to my
wrist.
July 2015
Shakhane and I bought the construction materials from a
local hardware store.
August 2015
Part of the Peace Corps grant agreement is that the
community must put up at least 25% of the project cost, which can be given in
cash or as an in-kind contribution of labor or materials. Our in-kind
contribution consisted of gathering and transporting sandy soil and stones for
construction of the sty. For a few weeks, the children would come together
after school to carry big stones from past the soccer ground all the way to the
garden.
September 2015
The contractors finished construction of the sty.
October 2015
Mrs. Faso and I purchased the pigs, 500 kg of pig feed, and
medicine.
Of course, the project is over only insofar
as my own involvement goes; hopefully, it will continue and eventually provide funds to
assist our OVCs.
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| Lifariki li teng. |
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