NGO Meetings

Monday, July 25, 2016

4 AM seems to be my happy hour and this time Jim joined me; we couldn’t go back to sleep because we were afraid we’d sleep through our appointment at 9:30 at the Church offices.  Instead, I did some wash.  Our meetings were set up by Elder Carley.  He attends a monthly WASH meeting and there meets with other NGO’s.  He decided to invite two of these to visit with us as sometimes we want to partner with others that might have better expertise in one area or the other-- more sustainability being the most important to us.

The first NGO was called Willamette, obviously started and based in Oregon; he was invited because they have a small staff and most of it is staffed by volunteers.  Their primary function is doing reasonably priced boreholes with hand drilling augurs.  They have mapping of the country so that they know where these will work, because they can’t do them just anywhere; but where they can, the cost is amazingly small in comparison to other methods.  The young man, Michael that we visited with us, lives here but is from the States.  [He has a wife and 2 children and then had adopted one more child in the US.  Here, they had been friends with a woman that died and felt impressed that they should adopt her baby and 2 year old.  The government would gladly let them adopt the children as no one else claims to want to take care of them because of their poverty (grandmother and father).  However, you can tell by the way that the government is stalling they are holding out for the bribe.  When frustrated they asked if the government would just take care of these children here, but they declined quickly.  They don’t want them, they just want to be paid for this couple to want them.  It is a shame.  I can tell that these are good people just by visiting with him.]  We felt as though this method of drilling would be great for some small area projects, but it didn’t include community development or hygiene training, which would have to be addressed in other ways; but Elder Carley could use them for the smaller projects that he could turn in.  We liked this young man.

We have known about this type of drilling before, but it actually is quite successful, even boring through granite.  It has a few advantages, such as pricing.  The limits are by region, so they don’t attempt to do them where it will not work.  They have two drilling systems.  They have trained 3 drilling teams using local people, so this is also a good plan to bring jobs to the people.

The second visitor was from a large German NGO that has been working since 1960.  The most appealing thing to us is that the man on the ground, project manager over water (they deal with many other types of projects), is not only LDS but he lives here locally and knows what will work and what doesn’t.  They do a lot of assessing first, and then come up with a plan that will work involving the community in the decision—what type of water project, how many people it would be for, etc.  I suggested that he give us a plan because we won’t just give the organization money to find out what to do and then decide later what it will be—the Church is going to want to have parameters that they can approve of or not.  But the type of approach he has could really work.  He loves to do just home wells where the caretaker is obvious.  The homeowner takes care of his own well and it is so reasonably priced because of the simple method that they use.  The owner can also sell his water to others and then has a business besides clean water for himself.  Elder Carley could develop small projects like this one if they let him.  His other favorite type is pumped water to tanks and distributed—those who want it pay for a water hookup fee, and then it is paid for or taken away from them.  Once they assess what will work in a community, then they can make a plan with that community with their input to make sure it will work out before doing anything.  But I think he might already know what will work in a given area, and can make proposals from that.  And, he is from this culture and will not be moving away from it like NGO’s just here for their contract time.

It was a very productive afternoon.  If nothing else, we think we know what might work, but then we’ve thought that many times…Sierra Leone has always been the most difficult place to have a successful water project no matter how much we improved the way that we did things.

Tomorrow we leave this hotel.  I like the desk for the computer, another small table, a small balcony, a fridge to the left, etc.  It is comfortable here and very convenient.  At the Country Lodge where we used to stay they had more amenities like a workout room and pool but we rarely had time to use them, and they had mosquitoes in the lower rooms and always when we ate; I haven’t seen a mosquito here yet in this place.  Luckily we will come back here in about a week.  It is also closer to the Church complex.

After we were finished with our long visits, we went to the mission home and Corbaley’s fed us lunch.  They are the couple that got in the accident whose name I couldn’t remember.  I thought that they couldn’t leave Freetown to live in Kenema because of their car accident, but she told us that it was because the mission apartment in Kenema is not ready for them---it used to be, before Ebola.  It seems that everything got ruined during that time.  Another couple, the Sherwood’s, are living where Schlehuber’s (forgot how to spell it) used to live in Bo, and that place has deteriorated also and they are being patient but the ‘fixer’s’ are being slow to respond.

Elder Don Carley picking us up at the boat dock on the other side of the bay in Freetown.  We noticed that both the waiting area on the airport side and on the Freetown side were either already enclosed or under construction like this one was.

After lunch we went back to the hotel and by that time it was late afternoon, a perfect time to catch up on our sleep.  Tomorrow we drive to Grafton to meet up with the Carley’s and will then drive to Kenema with them.  We will be coming back with Jonathan so he can look at the Freetown project that got left during Ebola to see how much we want to fix.  This way we won’t have to use the slightly broken car on a long trip.   

Off to dreamland…