Morale musings.

It’s amazing how fast time flies here. We ended last month with five potential projects, and now we’ve got a deadline of November 20th to have on proposal completed entirely. And while this seems like ample time, I’m already getting stressed about how we’ve lost the first week of November. Granted, we only got here two days ago, but still, this seems much more important than most other jobs I’ve had before.

It’s seems important, though the state of some previously completed GFS systems makes me wonder about how useful our completed GFS systems will be. Case in point, we are hoping propose a new GFS system that runs in parallel to an 18-year old system. The 18-yr old system was originally designed for 36 taps. A number of illegal connections has bumped that number up to reportedly 100 taps (I say reportedly, because, of course, nobody knows how many taps are on the line). Of these 100 taps, only 20 taps work. After surveying the line yesterday, it has become apparent that the reason the majority of the line doesn’t work is because of lack of maintenance rather than any other major issue. Maintenance should have been taken care of by the community, but it would seem to be a classic case of tragedy of the commons. The community has formed a water committee which is empowered to collect money from the people to repair the taps and sections of the line that need maintenance. But obviously the maintenance has been non-existent, or at least minimal to the point that they are now begging NGOs to come in and fix the line.

Unfortunately, that seems counter to the whole “sustainable development” philosophy that Acts and likely CIDA and most NGOs seem to be aiming for. If the community can’t keep an existing line in good repair, how is our line going to be any better?

So of course, this leads to the whole question of why bother? Having worked for the past eight years, I’m used to massive amounts of money being spent to bring a relatively small amount of land with a relatively small amount of contamination into regulatory compliance. So in comparison to that, I have a very clear idea of how useful this work and money will be.

Unfortunately, my teammate Wesley is just out of university and is young (I can’t believe I’m describing someone else as young here – the true indication that I’m starting to mature? Nonsense!) and idealistic. So he’s been more affected by the neglect of the current systems and how nothing to seems to last and that nobody seems to care. He also understands that it’s more complicated than that, but that hasn’t assuaged his creeping cynicism. And here I thought I would be the one who was cynical. Almost as counterpoint, I'm finding the whole exercise rewarding, and have a very clear picture of how I'll be helping people. Blissful naivity?

Anyway, on Wednesday we headed back up to Kasese after meeting briefly with the Mbarara district water engineer (who, amazingly, seems to be even more disorganized and ill-prepared than Kasese). We arrived Wednesday afternoon and have been spending the last two days gathering information to complete a proposal for a GFS project that would bring water to 10,000 people. I’m hoping we can complete the design, cost estimate and proposal this weekend, but that might be ambitious. Either way, it'll be a computer oriented couple of days. Which is good because while hiking about the beautiful hills is nice, I don't really feel like my presence is of any value. The design stage is where I start earning my keep.