Our First Proposal (draft)

So we’ve finalized our preliminary design for the Bwesumbu GFS. It will have two glorious components and stretch over ~15km. It is designed to feed a current population of 6,000 and a 20 year population of 10,000. The materials alone will cost ~$200K, and while that may seem like a lot, we’re really looking for that magic figure of $250K, which, when everything else is tallied together, will represent for Acts the maximum funding they can seek from CIDA.

As this is the first CIDA proposal we’re ever written, we’ll be depending heavily on the higher ups at Acts to take a close look at it, and hopefully correct the errors we’ve made in our inexperience. But still, I’m quite proud of the design and proposal.

We’ve basically spent five of the past six days on this proposal. But it’s our first, so I’m hoping the rest will be easy. In fact, I’ve already completed the designs on two more systems. What originally took me five 10hr days now takes me 4-6 hrs. So nice to notice the improvement. But it’s also reassured me that I didn’t go into the wrong field. It’s fun to do for a while, and certainly seems to yield more immediate, concrete results than environmental consulting, but spending your life looking at spreadsheet calculations would drive me mad.

So now that we’ll have one down, we need to send off two more similar proposals in the near future, and while we have candidates, none of them seem clear cut. One is a three hour hike up. A second already has some water coverage, and the source isn’t high enough. And the leadership of the third is either absent half the time, or drunk. Which, while entertaining, doesn’t lead to a high degree of confidence in community participation in the project. So while we ended the month with five potential projects, three of them leave a few things to be desired...

Ah well, such is life with NGOs I guess...

On Wednesday we drove to a new part of the district, also in the foothills, but in a deep valley. While the other places we’ve visited all have spectacular views of the eastern rift valley, this one was completed surrounded by hills with the resulting effect that this place looked cut-off from the rest of the world. Cool, but I swear I heard a banjo playing in the background.

It was the first time we’d gone out in the field since we’d gotten back, and we’d forgotten how hard it was to get food out there. Most of the time we skip lunch because as soon as we arrive in a community, we’re surrounded by the locals. Most of whom accompany us for the duration of our time there. So when we pull out our biscuits or samosas, we either have to share, not share and guiltily eat in front them, or sneak off and quickly eat the food without appearing to be eating.

So we’ve learned to eat little at lunch, which usually means we’re starving by 3pm. But this time we were in luck. We finished our assessment in the early afternoon, and were able to stop at a trading center to get Rolexes for a very late lunch. A rolex is a chapatti (or chapat as they call them) and fried egg, rolled up (hence the “rol” in rolex). Out of the many foods I’ve discovered in this country, this has to be my favorite. The second most delicious would have to be the banana pancakes, which are made from sweet (yellow) bananas and cassava flour. The common ingredient between the two is grease. Hmm, grease.