Uta has a serious case of World Cup fever and we are suffering along with the community. The planning committee has big plans to get the entire building 100% complete by the time the World Cup is over so that we have something to celebrate once the World Cup fever clears.

In order to celebrate we will hold a performance at the hall with children dancing performances, choir singers and speakers from the community. Everyone in the committee will have a role. Azaph (a village elder) will start off the performance with a group prayer – as is custom in the village. Angie is helping to choreograph a dance performance. She has the children at her house every week for a rehearsal. We were lucky enough to attend such a rehearsal and we were so pleased to see her running a dance class at her home which can soon be done in the hall! Lucky is making plans to have a feast after the performance. The community wil have meat, pap and sauce. Ethel will make a speech describing the planning committee’s role and what they have been through to get this project off the ground and then completed.

We are so happy to finally be planning this event and we can’t wait for a blog entry in the future describing the time spent at the event! We are so close! Yay!

Shangaan word of the day: mpfula – open

This week, builders laid the concrete slab at the community centre. This marks great progress as the foundation is complete and means that the walls will quickly start to get higher and higher. Finishing the slab required a lot of materials and labour in the hot sun, providing both the Project Steering Committee and the builders with challenges–especially in regards to water.

At the community centre site sits a 5,000 liter water tank, which the Project Steering Committee has borrowed from the family of Uta’s headman. This has provided a supply of water to the construction site in the most efficient way possible in a village with no access to running water. When the communal taps near the community centre are working–for a day or two once a month–the water tank can be filled from a hose by members of the Project Steering Committee. However, construction of the centre takes much more water than these unreliable taps can provide, especially during the recent construction of the slab. The solution, for both the centre and families who can afford to pay for water, is to have a community member with a tractor or a pick-up truck drive to a nearby dam or working tap in another village with thirty or forty 20 liter containers and fill up water to deliver. This is unfortunately both expensive and inefficient, but it is the solution for now.

For some families, having clean water delivered to their homes is just not affordable. Girls are often seen before and after school and women in the hot afternoon sun pushing wheelbarrows to the dry river to dig for water or to a temporarily working tap across the village to fill up their water containers. This may or may not be safe for drinking, and almost always families live on an insufficient amount of water.

The local government is generally unresponsive to the lack of access to water. Living here for eight months, we have seen a municipality truck deliver water to select families in the community only two or three times. The ward councellor, the representative of the Bushbuckridge Municipality for this area, has guaranteed that there will be a permanent solution to the water crisis by 2012–a large dam is being built in the region with pipelines to connect water to hundreds of communities in the area currently without it. Not only does this mean at least two more years without access to water in Uta, but there is little trust among the community that this promise will be fulfilled. Short-term solutions in the area include the digging of boreholes and the repair of existing water engines and pipelines, but neither are easy tasks. This is a dry area, limiting natural water access due to insufficient rains and a lack of underground water supplies. Thus, the water crisis is both a result of current government mismanagement and a lasting effect of apartheid’s land distribution systems.

For the community centre, lack of access to reliable water means higher costs and temporary construction delays when none is available. We will be working with the Project Steering Committee to develop solutions for water at the centre–likely meaning the construction of a borehole in the future. For the community, the country, and the region, the water crisis means so much more. Almost one-fifth of the world’s population lives in areas of physical water scarcity. Almost a quarter faces economic water shortages, in which countries lack the infrastructure necessary to carry water from rivers and aquifers. That is 1.6 billion people living without sufficient access to water. Sub-Saharan Africa has the most water-stressed countries of any region. Clean water is a foundation of human health, and too many struggle to survive without it. The community centre will be a resource in Uta, eventually housing a source of community water and serving as a place where community members can meet to speak with their local leaders and elected officials, demanding the access to water they deserve.

Shangaan word of the day: mati – water

Working on international development from a cushy Washington, DC office has its challenges. People always say that you must love your job purely because your mission is important to you, and that you feel like work is rewarding outside of yourself. They are correct, but it’s not so simple.

The issues and their solutions are the drivers for my work – and I think I can speak for my staff and say they share the same attitude – but we sometimes lose sight of that. As the leader of the organization, it is important that I help the team stay focused on the mission. The low pay or lack of direct access to fieldwork opportunities all the time can be discouraging, especially when the times get tough.

So I put together a graph that explained this. Energy and Goal Clarity (See Graph) seem to be directly related over time. I have no problem working 14 hours a day on SMRC projects – even if it means just drafting memos or setting up meetings – if it also means that I am pursuing a clear and understandable goal. Goals like building a school for 300 children, providing young leaders access to a community that will inspire a lifetime of work, and so on. There will be inevitable drop offs; sometimes you just don’t feel the inspiration. But if you can keep yourself in the top half of the graph – always have a good to very good sense of what you are working towards (you may want to post a big sign on your desk that reminds you!) then you will always have the energy to kick it into gear.

That’s how we are looking at the challenge of being so removed from making a direct impact for so many months out of the year. It has been helping us out so far… in a future post I will fully describe our goals, which gives us that much needed clarity!

The GDA to South Africa was an amazing way to spend my last spring break in college. SMRC provided the GDA participants with the ability to fully immerse in the culture and life style of rural South Africa. While on the GDA we experienced more in a week then most do in a trip for three weeks. During the GDA there is never a moment when you feel like you are wasting your time or you could be doing something else. This had a lot to with the home stay experience. Andrea, Katie, and I stayed in Richard Siwela’s brother’s home, which is across the street from Richard. The house was beautiful and you could tell the family had put a lot of hard work into it. They had four or five bed rooms with nicely tiled floor, a newly renovated kitchen with large counter-tops and a nice sitting area with a TV and couches. They also had a really nice bathroom with a toilet, sink, and bathtub. Unfortunately because of the lack of running water the toilet and sink did not work. The family was so welcoming and was really interesting to talk to about their jobs and daily life. We found out our host was the first women in the community to go to college!

One of the best parts about staying in Uta was that over the few days we were there we really got to know different members of the community. I just remember the first day we arrived we decided to walk as a group over to Shiviti Primary School. When we started walking we had about ten kids from the community walking with us, but the farther we walked the more kids and members of the community joined us. It was also amazing to watch Saul and Megan run into old friends from past trips to South Africa. It was just so exciting to observe the relationships that years of being a part of this community had established. By the time we got to the school we had 25 or so kids walking with us, and they were so excited to show us their school!

The pride they had about their school and their community was remarkable. The school was closed because it was a Sunday, but later in the week we were given the opportunity to go back and visit. When we went back to Shiviti it was late in the afternoon and students had already left for the day. So we decided to go see the library Megan and the interns had worked on. When we walked in the brightly painted room we saw a class of students each with a book quietly reading to themselves. It was almost unbelievable. The library was no longer an SMRC run project but a resource 100% utilized by the school and the students. While talking to the children of Uta, they tell you about their dreams and hopes for the future. Even the answers given by children as young as 8, clearly showed the success of SMRC projects. These children are empowered and believe in their futures, they want to be lawyers, doctors, and teachers. Which is amazing in anof itself, but the truly inspiring thing is that they all want to receive their degrees and then come back and work in their community.

Being an intern for SMRC in DC, I had read a lot about our work. But that never prepared me for what I saw in terms of our impact in the community. But the commitment to change and a future without poverty is two sided, the people in Dixie and Uta have taken it upon themselves to see results and development. This two sided commitment is what makes all the difference.

Lily Muldoon, project director for Kenya, has just returned to the United States. Her work is a testament to the power of individuals to improve lives. SMRC has worked with her in Kenya for 3 years, and we have achieved life changing improvements working in partnership with the Kayafungo community.

Among the achievements over the last year: Construction of 14 latrines, 20 handwashing stations, one primary school, class at a secondary school, a water dam for 900 people, training for 160 Community Health Trainers, HIV/AIDS testing and education for 132 people, rainwater catchment systems at a primary school and health dispensary, and a micro-loan for a health clinic. Young people can do anything!

Madam’s Organ is located at 2461 18th Street NW, Washington, DC, 20009.

Last week, SMRC asked its supporters to help us build a Dam and a Secondary School. We were running short of funds, and your help would get us past the finish line. Well, you did it, and here are the pictures to show your impact. Thank you so much!!!