As with
most places in I have worked in, Sundays are a really bad day to try to do
work.. Most community members are in churches or resting at home, so Sundays
can be difficult! Needless to say, after the usual morning routine of Bongo flavour
and this morning, learning how to make chipati with the local host mother, we
said our goodbyes and thanks for the hospitality at our homestay and headed off
to the farthest village.
Kikundi Village
is a long ways from the main Kiroka Village and is difficult to access. From
Kiroka Village, one must take the small footpath leading through parts of
Kungwe Village and beyond to finally get to Kikundi. Otherwise, the village can
also be accessed via a better road from Dar es Salaam highway, which means that
most people access it from this side, making the village fairly disconnected
from the rest. This is why we packed all our things up ahead of time, because
this way we would just go back to Morogoro via the Dar es Salaam highway rather
than going backwards through the rough village trails.
Upon
arriving into the centre of Kikundi the roads became nice and things seemed to
be very clean and organized. As we pulled up to the quaint village office, with
an open field and school in the background, we met the Village Executive
Officer and one of the main counsillors their chatting about local politics.
Once again, this was my first time really seeing Kikundi village so it was
interesting to see the layout and how much it differed from other villages.
Kikundi has a similar village organization to Kungwe. Things are very spread
out in this village and people seem to be living in scatters all over the place
(unlike in Kiroka and Kiziwa where people seem to be living more clumped
together). However, unlike the other villages, this village seems to be the
most ‘clean’, at least aesthetically speaking, and even the way trees grow in
the main part of the village is very orderly and organized.
However, it
was still a Sunday in Kikundi and as a result this meant we had to play the
normal waiting game before anything started. Due to miscommunication here also,
it meant that in the end the needs assessment (for today) was only meeting
village leaders and not community members. This was fine however, because it
was still a great introduction to the village. The meeting was dominated, as
per usual, by men, however the few women present were respectfully heard and
shared their opinions openly, so it was excellent! After completing the first
section of the needs assessment I came to realize that this village has had a
significant amount of development work done here! They not only had several
organizations come in to do micro-finance, health, environment, and basic
agriculture work, they are finishing up a building called a agriculture bank
(or something of the sorts) whereby it is a storage facility for agricultural
products and people can get micro-loans from it. I am not sure entirely how
this works (even to this much later day) but it was an interesting system to
say the least!
Finally,
after a long five days of data collection it was time to go back to Morogoro
town... So before I knew it we were on the highway headed back into a water
supply system, cell phone reception, electricity based (although sparse, of
course) society filled with modest levels of consumerism and music filled
streets.
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