Success!

So I thinks it’s worth mentioning that I am posting this from here in Cha de Igreja from the comforts of my own home in fact, via internet which I had installed upstairs a few days ago. Despite what anyone may think may think about the relative poshness of my Peace Corps experience here in Cape Verde, let me assure you that Cape Verde is still Africa, and that getting internet installed in Cha de Igreja, indisputably among the poorest, most remote, isolated and just plain hard to get to places in the country, is not an easy thing to do. Nevertheless, I’ve done it, and its awesome.
I’ve managed to create an office of sorts for myself in the (previously completely barren and unused) room that connects to my bedroom. I ranja’d (arranged) myself a little table and an extra chair, and as I type this out, I’m looking out across my balcony watching the colors on the mountains change as the sun sets in a wild blue sea behind me, and it’s easy to imagine staying here for another year.

Anyway, we just wrapped up the World AIDS Day Week in Cha de Igreja and I gotta tell ya, it was pretty goddam terrific if you ask me. All in all we had in the neighborhood of 900 participants/spectators over the course of the week, which is pretty good considering there are only 397 people currently living in Cha de Igreja, with about the same number in both my neighboring villages, Cruzinha and Garça.
We fed and provided free transportation to nearly all of those, gave red balloons to about three fourths, condoms to half of them, hand sewn red ribbons to about a third of them and some really handsome looking T-shirts to a little over a fourth of them. This was definitely the HIT of the week (along with the town screening of Iron Man) and people went absolutely BATSHIT CRAZY for the shirts. You’d have thought I was handing out iPods or something. We had radio advertising and a journalist from the national paper in attendance. We also managed to have a two-day soccer tournament with trophies, a children’s poster contest, some REALLY cool co-ed youth dance performances. We built a basketball court, had a mural painted, and showed a week’s worth of movies in the plaza. And we did it all for around three thousand dollars. Oh yeah...we also managed to get some AIDS awarenessing done.

All joking aside, I can honestly tell you that I feel that every single person that participated in the project has come away from it a little better informed, and a lot more willing to talk about AIDS, than they were before. And certainly the project has been a real accomplishment in terms of the “community development” that is my main “mission” in the Peace corps. All of the above was accomplished, with the help of Peace Corps, by the community leaders I’ve come to know, using, to the extent possible, community assets to address community weaknesses. All the while (if I’ve done my job well), teaching them about capacity building, and most rewardingly for me, allowing them to recognize their own capacity to pull off something of this magnitude.

Last night at about midnight, as I sent the last of the revelers on their way, turned out the lights and locked up the polivalent, I came across Joailson, a really laid-back, respectful and thoughtful teenager I really like, as he was heading home. I asked him what he thought of the project and he stopped and looked at me and said:

“Mos, nunk n’ha vida k’m oyab un coisa moda kel’la. Foi cool mon. Foi cool.”

That means, word for word:

“Man, never in my life have I seen something like that. It was cool man. It was cool.”

Well, words cannot express how happy that made me feel. All of which is not to say that I’m not about ready to murder half of the people in my town.

The honest truth is that I give us a solid “B-” overall, but we could have, should have, been able to do better. In the end (and the beginning and middle come to think of it) I did A LOT of the work on my own, and literally had to get in arguments with some people to get them to hold up their ends of the bargain. I feel like had I done a little more ass-kicking and had been a little less polite to some of my fellow organizers, we coulda got the A. But Peace Corps taught us, and I agree, that if we as the volunteer are doing all the work, we’re not doing our job well. So for some things I just delegated or advised and let the people who asked to be responsible, be responsible. As it turned out, many of those people were fairly irresponsible.

We suffered many setbacks. The Minister of Health couldn’t see fit to send out a doctor to present the actual AIDS information, or even to return our calls. The fact that we asked them to send us one pissed off the nurse who lives in our town, and he refused to participate in anything thereafter. (Aside: We have the world’s worst male nurse. In a fit of nepotistic blindness, the kamera installed a man who is nauseous at the site of blood and who is allergic to penicillin, and therefore unable to administer those shots, as the chief health care professional in the entire valley. He is also extremely lazy, even by Cape Verdian standards, which is saying a lot. Him I actually admonished in public, which, in this country, is definitely not cool, but everyone in the room was thinking it at the time and it needed to be said.) He was replaced by Romeo, a volunteer bombero (fireman) who had just completed an AIDS awareness formaçao.
The T-shirt company raised their price while also delaying the pick-up date by several days. The sporting equipment supplier failed almost completely. The wood-dealer in Povoçon short-changed me on the purchase of the wood we ended up buying to make the basketball goals. Several people threatened me with bodily harm after I told them that I couldn’t just give them a shirt...that they had to in fact participate in some way.
The girls soccer tourney racket design didn’t allow for a nil-nil tie, which is in fact what happened. Unbelievably, we were unable to determine a winner of the girl’s tournament and so that trophy is currently sitting on my kitchen table.
Several drunks from Cruzinha decided to proveita (take advantage) of the free transportation and they managed to interrupt play several times.

Other things went well though. Several times yesterday I was sort of overcome with pride to think of all the work I’d done to help put this thing together, and then to look around and see so many people laughing and running and playing and competing and eating and yes, even talking about AIDS.
For the first time, possibly in the history of Cape Verde, there was food and drinks left over at the end of the party. Really delicious food. There was, really, mountains of delicious food.
The shirts were well designed, well made, lots of sizes, and turned out great. There was a HUGE demand. We should have spent more on T-shirts and less on free transportation, because I have NO DOUBT that people would have gladly walked here from wherever, at the mere chance of getting a T-shirt. The impact of the T-shirts is really impossible to overstate. People were acting all bananas with regard to the T-shirts. It was instant publicity, instant interest, instant participation. And because we were giving one away every 30 minutes to people who could answer AIDS related questions or make their AIDS Pledges, it kept people in the polivalent, and paying attention, all day. Today was Monday, the first day after the activity, and nearly everyone is still wearing their T-shirts. There is a knock on my door about every 5 minutes from someone wanting to make an AIDS pledge and pick up a T-shirt.

The best part of the community contribution part came in the form of 2 teenagers (Djon and Herman) who were put in charge of building the basketball goals. I mentioned to them that the Sports place reneged on the deal to sell me some backboards and rims and the next day they gave me a list of all the materials they would need to make some themselves. I was able to get the materials and in less than three days we had a basketball court. No shit. They welded and everything.

Incontrovertibly, the best moment of the entire week 8for me) was last night when, in front of most of the population of this entire valley, I gave Wandinha what amounts to a more-than-the-rest-of-her-lifetime-supply of condoms. I have never seen Wandinha sober. Wandinha is approximately 50, but due to extreme exposure to the sun and wind and heat, and to a diet consisting solely of grogue and sugarcane, looks about 138 and is absolutely the last person on the earth that should be having any sort of sex. This gesture went over extremely well with the crowd, and people were howling, crying, screaming, nearly dying with laughter as she proceeded to amorously stumble-chase me around the court for the next ten minutes. Ah man. I will never forget that as long as I live.

Anyway, “Foi cool, mon. Foi cool.” Pics below.