You just cannot plan for everything, sometimes things just happen…

First there was: Enthusiam

That is the right word for what we felt just after we came back from the village in the beginning of November – we worked hard, too hard – since Johannes then lay down with a back-problem for three days, cause he really wanted to finish that water turbine for the next trip to M’muock. We met with the MUDECA president discussed with him our plan for the village and met with Vincent and Dr. Kennedy and were all really excited that now the project was going to really make a step forward.

 

We worked on our data from the questionaires – evaluating them and we wrote a project report (unfortunately only available in German) about our progress so far.

 

We really had the feeling everything was just going perfectly as we had planned – except for the delay we had had due to the late arrival of material from Germany and the customs problems.

But then it hit us hard – shortly after we had sent out our project report to our donors and funders in Germany in late November we got news that a transformer had been erected in our project village…meaning that the village will be connected to the national grid line in 2009. Meaning also that our renewable erngy systems that we were to train on cannot compete with the subsidised AES Sonel electricity. And that we had made clear from the beginning of the project – that if Sonel comes the project is useless…

 

Demotivation and shock

That was the feeling we then had – from – we have to cancel the whole project to how stupid were we and to “how will we ever explain this to anyone at home?” – as we thought nobody will believe that we did not know about this transformer and everybody will blame us for being really stupid and naiv and not being able to plan well. We had some sleepless nights and were almost ready to go home and just drop everything. We had the feeling that everything we worked to hard on had just been a huge waste of time!

 

Carry on with it

Our partners and especially Vincent and Dr. Kennedy made us not jump to conclusions and asked us to stick with the program for the project for the time being until we had been to the village and seen what the feeling of the villagers was. But at the same time we also started working on a plan B, that would include looking for a second village and starting the whole project there.

 

So we did – and we were glad we did. We went on December 4^th to an agricultural show in Menji, where we saw the opportunity to speak to different villagers from the Lebialem area to start looking for a second village. During our stay there we stayed at Vincents brothers house – which was amazing – he has a livestock farm where he in the long run wishes to train young people from the area in livestock farming as a different source of income. The place is amazing and he showed us around his farm where he keeps all sorts of chicken, pigs, rabbits and bushmeat – procypine and canerat. We were really glad to have met him and had some quality time in his compound.

 

canerat

 porcypine

 mhmhm - snails

 

Unfortunately it rained during the agric show – which made the minister of agriculture run through the field to visit the stands since he did not wish to get too wet. It was quite a funny sight – everybody trying to run after him and throwing some last words and comments on him about the projects they were carrying out. Since the rain was not usual for december there was of course the rumour that the people of menj had jinxed the weather to show the minister how bad the roads to Menji were and how much people suffer there. The rumors died out though after they found out that it had rained all over the south west province

We had quite some busy time at the show – since many people came to enquire about the technology and project and Edwin spent the whole day explainig things. We got some good contacts out of the show and it is now for us to start identifying those new villages and seeing what potential they have for wind and/or water.

 

 

After the show we went to M’muock Fosimondi as planned and saw the transformer erected directly in the compound we usually stay in – make you really believe that there is something like jinxes here J. We also found out that for 2009 four additional transformers are planned for the village – meaning the village will be connected to the national grid soon…

In the village we met with our project-helpers in the village Musa and Chief Fonang Festus to discuss the new developments and also to discuss this with the benficiaries of the demonstration wind- and waterturbines as well as with the interested craftsmen that wished to take part in the training. They were all still really in favour of carrying on with full scale of the project, but we got the feeling that it was for the craftsmen more important to have any technical training in the village that would help them use the force of wind or water to do things like water pumping and so on. They also had the idea of building turbines and selling them to neighbouring villages. And the were talking a lot about bringen M’muock on a map. But we have to say – this is and was not the aim of the project – the aim is to bring a source of electricity and in that development to rural areas where there is no. The aim is not to exclusivly do something for M’muock – if that was the case then we should have named our organisation differently… So for our own decision about how to carry on we had to consider that what people in village say and said includes an interest of “not letting the whitemen go”. But we still did consider all they said and now made our mind up and came to the following plan B.

 

Plan B

After hearing what they had to say we came up with this:

 

-          we will erect the demonstration sites for wind and water in the beginning of january and people can test them for 3 months – in that way we get some experience and data on what needs to be improved and people can see the advantage/disadvantage of the turbines towards national grid. After 3 months they can decide on whether they want to buy the turbines or if the want to give it back to us.

-          we will drop training on our wind- and waterturbines since there will be no market for the craftsmen to sell the turbines to and the turbines cannot compete with Sonel

-          we will continue the project planning on environmental education and farming methods in M’muock and if time and ressources are there we will do some technical training on water pumping with wind

-          we will look for a second village to start the training there – this time with more consideration and research on what are plans for electrification for the village. This actually has some positive aspects since we will have the chance to train a projectmanager of Cameroon hands on o how to go about implementing the project in new villages.

-          we will continue with the rest of the project (mulitplier trainings) as planned

 

 

People in M’muock still wish to carry on with the full scale of the project as said before. But the project is about training those villagers that are in need. That means villages were there is no light and training for craftsmen of those villages. Now that Sonel is coming to M’muock, it is not in need of electricity any more. That does not mean that we will drop the village – but the focus of trainings and the focus of projects has to shift. Time and ressources for this project and for us are limited and since training the craftsmen of M’muock might make the project somewhat useless and unsustainable (since they would have no market to sell to) and would not not serve the project aim we think that the above stated plan B is the best option.

 

We are not dropping M’muock, but we need to adjust the project so that it really makes sense for everyone.

 

The fact finding mission

We also went on a fact finding mission to find out how we could have not known about this transformers and whether any of the project-partners is to blame for withholding information or for not doing research well. We were able to find out that no-one is to blame directly, since Nkong Hilltop did research since December 2007 very well with the ministries. I myself went to the delegation of the ministry of economic planning and rural development ( I forgot if that is the right name – there is a million ministries here!) to look up the “logbook” where all projects for all villages in Cameroon are planned in and that is brought out every january for one year. And NOTHING is stated in the logbook about a transformer for M’muock Fosimondi in 2008. The person we met there did not know anything about it either. He said that maybe since the neighbouring village had a project on electrification in 2008 the contractor put one of the transformers from there to our village.

Another reason might be that the people of M’muock gathered quite a sum to start building a hospital and the government planned for 2009 to assist the village on this. So maybe since this was on they thought light might be good option too for the village – you never know.

We also wonder if me might have awakened sleeping dog when we informed all the various delegations and minstries about our planned project…

And another option would be someone just pulling the right trigger somewhere in some minstry for this rural electrification project to be taken up again…

However it was – this is the new situation now and we will deal with it as described above.

 

Our naivity

What we of GREEN STEP have to admit is that we had seen power lines going up to the village (high voltage) in 2007 (they were there since 2005/6), but the project had been dropped and everyone we spoke to and everywhere were our project partners enquired said that the project had been inactivated and that there were no plans to take it up again in the near future. We ourselves relied on this information and we did not consider that Sonel might take it up again since they had been privatised and have no incentive to bring light to villages since they don’t consume much. And it also wasn’t Sonel that brought the transformer but the government. This we did not research well enough – we should have known that these decisions are made by the government and not the company.

We did not consider this enough in our project planning and we take full responsibility for this and wish to apologize if anyone feels we have mislead them about this project. We do feel a little bit naiv and stupid about this, but on the other hand – it is a lesson learned for us that we will consider strongly with any project planning from now on.

 

After all – these are circumstances that we could not influence and we strongly believe that it is ok to make mistakes as long as you stand up for them and learn from them.

 

We will carry on with project now – a little slower as before and not rushing into things, but we are strongly believing that with this Plan B we found a good solution and will now be able to reach even more people.

 

After all this up and down of feelings, fact findings, 11-hour- days 7 days a week we will now be going on a short vacation for christmas and be going up to Lebialem on the 31^st with Ed from International Children Awareness (Canada) to see his projects and villages, trying to see if there might be any suitable second villages.

On January 2^nd we will be back in the village to erect the test-sites and speak with the craftsmen and beneficiaries again!

 

Something funny in the end - we passed this villag on our way to Menji - we were laughing aloud when we saw as it has the name every european would imagin an african village should have. It iven got a website!

 

 

 

Now we wish all our friends, sponsors and donors albeight the “bad news” (which are actually good news since the village is getting light, although not through our project) a

 

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

 

Cornelia and Johannes

 

 

Dieser Eintrag wurde am 17.12.2008 um 18:50 verfasst und befindet sich in project reports from Cameroon, english blog. Sie können alle Antworten zu diesem Eintrag über den Feed RSS 2.0 mitverfolgen. Hinterlassen Sie eine Antwort oder einen Trackback-Link zu Ihrer eigenen Homepage.

| Drucken