Change, CHE-ange, Change

It’s been difficult being away from the Sahel for many months now and how life goes on there and changes happen without us! One such big change is that the CHE national trainer for our partner church has been transferred to live in the capital. While he and I have worked very closely in the past and lived fairly close together, this is a big change that we would be living 10+ hours apart and have to figure out how to continue to collaborate. We’ve been collaborating virtually for a while now, but it has proven to be more difficult than expected. 

Partly because all internet options depends on cell phone reception, which can be very spotty, even in major cities. So this will take some new envisioning for us to determine what role we have to play at this stage. We have always been living in the heart-land of the church and near the national church leaders, so are trying to discern where it will be best for us to live and what new ways of doing things will we discover. Of course there are many other things up in the air with COVID-19, like when we will be able to travel back to the Sahel and be a physical part of the work again anyway. 

The SMART center that's been established in the capital.  This stands for a 
Simple, Market-Based, Affordable, Repairable Technologies center focused on
water and sanitation. Pictured is a rope hand pump on the left, irrigation basin 
in the middle, and shelter in the background for tools and workshop space.

The part of this change that seems most beneficial is that my co-worker, the CHE national trainer, is living in the capital to oversee another initiative of the church that could provide very interesting shared opportunities. It is a water and sanitation initiative that will operate out of a SMART center, which is a place meant to train local craftspeople to make the right tools for hand-drilled and hand-pumped wells, more culturally desirable latrines, and other water innovations for their communities. The idea is to make these innovations become part of the private sector of services available to individuals, instead of just something that NGOs pay to have put in a community. Then individuals become more interested in the personal benefits they get and so they take care with personal resources to keep these benefits going. Local craftspeople also see the economic benefits to advertising and recommending these new innovations themselves.

-- El Padre