Community Water Seminar and Meeting

I organized a community water seminar for the current and future beneficiaries of my local aqueduct.  Two other volunteer, Jake and Erica, came to help me give the talks. (Check out Erica's post and excellent photos about the event in my site.)

I planned the event for the morning of the day my Peace Corps Environmental Health (EH) boss was scheduled to visit the community and run a meeting about receiving another volunteer after me. The timing of the seminar/meeting was not ideal – Sunday morning is church time for many, and a national presidential candidate was also arriving in a nearby community by helicopter for a political rally.  And to kill 2 cows for the people to eat. 

The seminar was scheduled to start at 8 am in the water president’s thatched house.  At 9 am there were only 6 people present but we started anyways with a skit about using contaminated water.  The 2 other volunteers and I felt a bit foolish doing a skit in front of an audience of 6 in a house, but that didn’t stop us.  I was the grumpy mom, Erica was the dirty girl who peed and then put her hands in the water bucket, and Jake was the messy dad.

The morning continued with 3 talks: 1) Home Water Purification, 2) Water Conservation during the Rainy and Dry Season, 3) Creating an Annual Work Calendar for Water Group.  By the 2^nd talk there were 12 adults and 4 kids present – not bad considering somewhere nearby there was a helicopter landing with free meat galore.    The small group was more conducive to an interactive workshop environment with lots of good questions.

We all ate a seminar-funded lunch at a neighbor’s house and then reunited for the Peace Corps meeting.  The Panama EH project recommends 3 consecutive volunteers in a given community to ensure sustainability of infrastructure.  Since I am the 1^st volunteer in my community and the aqueduct is not finished, I had suspected that a volunteer would be replacing me in October.  However, this year the new EH group arrives in May for training and will move to the communities in July – 4 months before my group leaves.

Although in other Peace Corps countries it is common to have more than 1 volunteer in a community, in Panama it is the rare exception, and never in small communities like mine.  Based on my experience, I am definitely a proponent of the isolation -> integration model: in my 1^st three months I only saw my American friends every 2 weeks and was submerged in a world of Ngaberi and Spanish.  Therefore of course my co-volunteers and I feel as if our follow-ups should go through this same rite of passage, which will not exactly be possible if we are still living there for the new volunteer’s 1^st four months.

My boss did a good job explaining this multi-volunteer dynamic to my community.  No, we will not be living together; the new one will live with host families at the beginning just like I did.   No, the new volunteer and I will not be together all of the time; we will each be doing our own thing most of the time.

But what does 2 EH volunteers “doing their own thing” consist of in a community of 20 houses?  I’m not quite sure.  We’ll find out in July.