The Road to Water: First Step, Throw a Party

This post is slightly out of order, as it happened the week before Christmas, but I wanted to share how I spent the tail end of 2009. As I’ve previously explained, the people in the shantytown and I are working with the municipality in order to get running water for their community (nearly 300 people share just 2 tubes of water in the street). A couple of months ago I brought members of the municipality to the community and they set up a commission so that the needs of these people are actually brought to the attention of the local government (this community had been completely forgotten by the municipality and hardly anyone in my town knows it even exists, so this was HUGE). The process of attaining water is very long and complicated and anyone that would like more details is welcome to email me. The bottom line is that the community is going to need to raise a lot of money that they don’t have in order to have water. Fundraising here is a lot different than where I grew up. People back home have money at their disposal to give away. People here use their entire paycheck each month, and not to buy a tenth pair of shoes or to go out to a nice restaurant (or any restaurant for that matter). It is used to buy rice, beans, eggs, milk, and diapers (and the occasional fake plant or statue of the Virgin Mary) for their family. This means that local fundraising takes a lot of heart, soul, guts, energy, and most of all – motivation and teamwork. While I consider the acquisition of water in this community my highest priority, I knew that something a little off the topic needed to be done in order to build a foundation for success. That’s right – we needed to have a Christmas Party.

Many people who live in the shantytown are ready and willing to work, and that is great, but people willing to work do not always successfully work together. In order for them to raise enough money to get water in their community, they are going to need to work together as they never have before. I decided that a Christmas Party would be a good practice project for testing out our teamwork skills. Everyone would need to pitch in to raise money for food, games, decorations and then to cook, find materials for and facilitate activities, set everything up, take everything down, etc. When I presented the idea to the community they were definitely all on board. One idea that got thrown in was to try to find presents for all of the children. I knew this would be an incredible amount of work, but if they wanted to work together to find presents for the poorest children in my town, I wasn’t about to turn down the idea.

In Peace Corps, we are not allowed to privately solicit gifts/donations, so my role became the motivator/cheerleader to get people moving and organized (which is in fact slower, more difficult, and quite frankly more frustrating than asking for donations myself, but it builds character and stuff). Peace Corps does this in part to ensure that all the development is coming from within the community. For the same reason, we have very heavy limitations on soliciting funds from the United States (we are to train and motivate local people to fund their own projects, not to write letters home to grandma and grandpa asking for handouts).

Keeping these regulations in mind, I got together with my partner-in-begging-for things, Guiselle, and we came up with a list of every business in the area. We also made a list of people we personally knew in the community who could help us out. Guiselle also works for a development associasion, and (because I am not allowed to) they wrote letters asking for funds from local businesses. We then held a meeting with the people in the shantytown in order to divide up responsibility of going to the local businesses on the list to ask for their support.

I got my adolescent group involved, and helped them to ask local people for support. They were very much a part of the party, which is great for their own experience in service to their community and also is a way for other people in the shantytown to see that their young people are doing positive things (they didn’t always have such a positive reputation among their neighbors).

Sparing you the painful details of the nearly month-long preparations, we were able to assure that every child received a present on Christmas. The best part is that we did not solicit the gifts from “Rich Uncle Bob” in the States, or from any single big corporation or foundation (not that there is anything wrong with that). All of the help and support came purely from local people, most of whom did not even know that the shantytown existed in their own community. In addition, we acquired enough food so that EVERYONE in the community was able to eat rice with chicken and pork (the most traditional of Tico party dishes), tortillas, cake, and refreshments.

The kids got their faces painted, played pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and pin-the-nose-on-the-clown, received goodie bags, had sack races and foot races, and enjoyed ice cream cones donated by the municipality. My group of adolescents served as DJs and helped run the activities. My favorite part of the whole day was in the morning when I arrived to help set up and found about 10 women in one family’s kitchen, cooking more food than any of us had ever seen all at one time. Seeing the smiles on their faces and the beautiful colors of the tomatoes, green beans, rice, beans, cilantro, onions, garlic, carrots, and spices was by far one of the most special moments for me as a volunteer. Many of them also appeared very anxious, but even that made me happy because it showed how much they wanted this event to be a success. I spent the morning making signs for all of the activities with the younger children, decorating and setting up the sound system with the teenagers, and making sure that the women cooking and other people helping to decorate had everything they needed.

This community was working together, and all of these materials and food were here because of that teamwork and the generosity of other people in our town. We partied all afternoon, and then I stayed around to clean up and enjoy the company of the people and bask in the success of our hard work. The whole day was long and exhausting, and planning this event was filled with lots of stress, running around like a crazy person, and things falling through, but it will forever remain as one of my best memories during my time here. They may not have been thinking about how this would help us gain water in the community, but it was very much on my mind throughout the process. I am now even more confident that we will be able to work as one unit in order to achieve this bigger, more complicated goal, as the experience of planning and executing the Christmas party gave us good practice and a chance to make mistakes on a smaller scale. Now it’s time to learn from the mistakes made and find success as we fry this much bigger fish – running water for 300 people. BUISINESS TIME!!!