I heart community development.

The snake my neighbors caught in my backyard and my mom cooked for lunch.





My counterpart teaching the ladies in my community how to manage their savings group.



The past few weeks I’ve been pretty busy doing a little bit of traveling and attending meetings, so I apologize for being bad about updating my blog. Things in my village have really started to pick up and I’m feeling very positive about my experience- mostly thanks to my counterpart.

Let me start from the beginning, the first week of school a math teacher approached me and introduced himself. He said “Hello! My name is Vichara and I love community development!” He asked me if I would be interested in working with him and I said that I wanted to wait a few months before getting into projects but then we would talk.

So a few weeks ago I asked if he wanted to be my counterpart for my girls camp this summer and he agreed. We decided to go into rural communities and conduct a needs assessment. Upon visiting our first village, we realized that they had greater needs than a girls empowerment camp.

The community mentioned having inadequate roads, no bathrooms, and only three wells for a community of about 300 people. The families all have about 10 babies each, and there isn’t enough food, clothes, or water to go around. There are no jobs, and the women complained that since their husbands are unemployed, they drink away what little money the family has which leaves nothing left to buy things the family needs. Domestic violence is also a big problem within the community, as well as a lack of schools. (There was a school in the community at one point, but since the roads are poorly constructed the teachers just stopped coming and the school shut down two years ago.)

So a few weeks ago we set up a Women’s Savings Group. The idea behind the group is that each member contributes 10,000R ($2.50) to get into the group, then 2,000R (50 cents) each month after. When a member wants to take out a loan to start a small business or to pay for a medical procedure, the women are able to have some start up capital. Plus it’s a larger chunk of money that the woman is able to have control over of, instead of having to hide smaller amounts of money from their husbands.

It was very exciting setting up the group because the community was so involved. We set up a meeting and had 14 women and one man show up. We elected 3 leaders within the group – two managers and one cashier. The cashier (who is the man) is in charge of holding onto the money, and the two managers keep their own separate records of each person’s contribution. We then gave each member a tracking sheet (similar to a checkbook) to keep track of their contributions and loans (a minor problem is that about half the women are illiterate, so they have someone else help them). Then, as a group we decided on the group rules. The group was very interested and there was a lot of discussion about what would be appropriate.

The best thing about the savings group is that it is completely run by the community, so in theory (if all goes smoothly), it will be completely sustainable. My two counterparts (two math teachers) and myself will come back once a month to check out the balance sheets and make sure there are no conflicts within the group and do a health workshop. We are also working on a water and sanitation project in the community that I will tell you guys more about later once I write my proposal and get the funding…