Went out to Ha Moahloli Thursday. This is the village where the BTCV group from the UK helped to build a community garden. Apparently, the garden is looking pretty scrappy and the indigenous plants have all died.
Ntate Matsitsi, the staff member who works in Ha Moahloli, has been trying to gather people to build a grow box at the nursery too but no one has come to collect stone. This has left Matsitsi and another staff member to work in the village alone. I flat out told Ntate Matsitsi that he should stop working on the grow box until people come to help. I even suggested that we auction off the purchased materials for the grow box to other villages. They can pay by the show of how much stone they have collected and community participation they gather. The donors, however, may not like that too much! Matsitsi knew what I was saying but part of the problem is everyone knows it's his job to work on these projects. I guess he must complete them even if no one else wants it completed. And that's the face of wasted time on an un-sustainable project.
Well this trip with Nthabileng to the nursery was to look at the site and talk to people responsible for watering and caring for the place. I went to lend another critical eye and to see for my self what's going on. By the look of everything the place could use some more lovin'.
The women who are responsible for the site are frustrated because they were promised payment for their work. It never seemed to occur to anyone to explain the labor needed to have a working nursery for indigenous plants, vegetables, and eventually fruit trees or the potential reward from their work. KMA also doesn't have the money to pay its own staff, much less to pay these guys. The idea of volunteers in Lesotho has been warped anyway. More accurately people are volunteering for work and expect to be paid for their attendance.
At least the site has a fancy new sign. It is meant to greet tourists and officials visiting the site. No one considered that people must find their way, first from Semonkong, and then to a village off the road and up the mountain. It hasn't even been a year and the well thought out mess seems destined to go the way of other 'white elephants'; those projects funded by good intentions but disconnected from the communities within which they are established.
I haven't determined if the community is just waiting for the BTCVs to return next year and not go home instead working there permanently or if everyone is just waiting for a constant paycheck. Either way they are wasting a good opportunity. There is a similar problem with the Organic Farming group who are starting to fray at the thought of the idea and the amount of work.
The problems don't seem to have a similar fix but I hope I can show just the opposite. Thinking for both groups like I would think for my self if I was preparing such a business venture, I realized that no one has actually sat down with everyone involved and discussed the actual benefits of such projects. No one has done any kind of market research and presented it to the members. Anyone else would want to look at potential savings or additional profits making extra effort worth the changes needed. I hope, at least, that I can take the group through this process and help them to understand the possibilities. Otherwise all the other trainings meant for these groups during the winter are pointless for a group that isn't sure why they are changing their methods in the first place.