Merry Christmas! The rains have started! The farmers in my region are very happy and are busy planting their crops. For most people in the Southern province, the dependence on the rain is so great that a bad season can devastate entire villages. The main crop in Zambia, maize, is a high water-requirement crop. Because of droughts over the past few years, people are now slowly beginning to diversify their crops to include those that need less water to achieve high yields, but the change is slow. When it comes to growing enough food to feed your family, most of us don’t like to take risks and would rather continue doing what we know. But this unwillingness to change may in fact be causing more harm to the families than is truly realized….. In November, I moved from my village in Luyaba to Monze town. This has allowed me to improve communication with the WaterAid offices (and people in Canada!) by being in an area that’s more central and has phone reception. My work with WaterAid, over the past 2 months, has involved ‘mobilizing’ communities to finish constructing their latrines. ‘Mobilizing’ is development lingo which, in my case, is used to describe visiting villages, holding meetings, encouraging people to complete their latrines and offering support. We also try to address any concerns or issues raised, and pass them along to the appropriate person. WaterAid works as a facilitator – theoretically, we don’t actually do any of the implementation on the ground after initial training. We conduct meetings at the beginning of our program to teach people about sanitation, water and hygiene issues and the health effects associated with these. We train leaders of the communities as latrine builders, pump caretakers, etc., and help to form V-WASHE (Village Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Education) committees. Once the program has been established, we work through our extension staff within the Department of Health who has employees permanently located in the rural areas. They gather information, perform monitoring, conduct meetings and essentially act as our eyes in the villages. In theory, this results in our program being fairly sustainable – but when did anything ‘in theory’ ever work well in practice? Many people in my area have better access to water and sanitation facilities because of WaterAid, but there are still numerous problems faced by the organization. One of the major obstacles is creating incentive for the extension staff to perform an effective job (they aren’t paid by WaterAid). Even though we may idealistically believe that they would perform their work for the ‘development of their community’, this takes a backseat to spending time and energy working to feed one’s family. Even through the Department of Health, the employees are very busy with their community health work and see WaterAid tasks as extra effort for which they don’t feel appropriately compensated. We are currently looking to partner with local NGO’s in order to attain a higher effectiveness, although this partnership has its drawbacks as well. Working with people in the rural areas has made me understand that I don’t understand. I don’t know what it’s like not to be able to leave the village, not to be able to eat what I want, when I want, to be truly vulnerable. Every day is a challenging experience and I’m thankful that I’ve had this opportunity to learn so much. Merry Christmas to everyone. I’m spending my holidays in Livingstone with a wonderful family and another EWB volunteer. Christmas isn’t as commercialized as it is at home, and it’s often easy to forget that it’s happening so soon (which is nice). So take care, enjoy time with friends and family, and perhaps for a moment, give thought to those who struggle each day to provide for their families and be thankful for all you have. Lots of love, Jenn