Two more days of house surveys done, bringing the total visited up to 33. There’s an amazing variety of living conditions in our village, and we saw the gamut. One of the last houses I visited yesterday was of Elias, a village leader we’ve worked with since we arrived back in 2008. He’s illiterate, yet is the village treasurer. Lacking what one would think is an essential skill for a treasurer (the abliity to write), I always assumed he got the job due to impeccable honesty. Upon seeing his house, I am pretty sure I was right. He, his wife, and his four kids live in a mud shack 15 feet square. Dirt floor, ruinous stove, scary pit out back for pooping. This man has never embezzled a cent. His wife has been to every health lecture we’ve ever given; this family is the best candidate I’ve yet seen for the kind of aid we’re bringing.
There are other good candidates, as well. This family also has no floor, a terrible stove, and the father makes a living by cleaning used glass candle holders, refilling them with new wax and wicks, and selling them. I’ve been working with their young adult son, Lucas, for months, trying to get a latrine project going. Here is their current situation: a board with a hole, that drops the poop out onto the hillside below.
Unfortunately, we also saw more bad aid candidates and people trying to abuse the system. Here we see another fancy new masonry house, and they want us to build them a stove. “You mean to tell me, they built this fancy new house without a kitchen?!” I asked.
“That’s right, there is no kitchen,” they answered.
“But they do eat, right?” I asked, annoyed.
They looked sheepish. “Err, they eat at the mother-in-law’s house up the hill.”
You see, this sort of thing makes me mad. Why would someone dump a ton of money into a house, but not build a kitchen or latrine? Yet we see it all the time here. They want foreign aid workers to do the last mile on their “mansion”, when we could (should?) be helping people living like Elias.
What really took the cake was when we visited a house requesting a concrete floor, but they already had one… as well as a nice stove. This family immediately struck me as fishy, since they had a few middle-aged men around chopping wood and fixing cars, and they had two big straight body trucks and a school bus in the yard. “We want it there,” a fat guy said, pointing from his chair leaned back against the front of the house, not even bothering to get up. I dutifully measured the area of ground UNDER HIS PICKUP TRUCK IN THE FRONT YARD. That’s not going to do much to help his family’s health, and I am going to let the village leaders tell him why he’s not going to get anything from us.
Despite these annoyances, there is still a lot of joy to be had in walking through the village and countryside, visiting people. These two kids were playing as we passed, and squealed with glee just to see us. The picture at the top of the blog post is Don Ximon, one of our best allies amongst the elders. He wanted to show us this house at the edge of his property. When he was a young man, he and all of his kids lived there. They ate, slept, cooked, did everything in that tiny adobe house. Now his kids have grown up and gone on to be doctors, nurses, and successful people; yet the family is still always giving back to the community. It’s largely because of Don Ximon that we ended up in our village in the first place. This house stands as mute testimate to how far things have come, despite how far they still have to go.