Guided by the soft hymns of Ben Harper, the last few days have been ones of increasing clarity for me. I hope I mentioned back somewhere that one of the main thrusts of my work was going to be forming village savings and loan associations, which are just a group of people who get together to form their own mini bank. This can give people access to the very small amounts of capital that are needed to increase productivity while also teaching about accounting, the benefits of saving and the process of taking out credit.
But I’ve been thinking more about the other thrust of what I want to do, which is working to encourage girl’s education. Mostly I plan on doing that in my own way by having a math tutoring session for girls, culminating in a spelling-bee like math tournament. Anyway, the reason I am writing a post this late at night is that I have almost finished Three Cups of Tea, which is about Greg Mortenson’s work to build schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is a very inspiring book and really well written (Unlike Beauty School Kabul, which made me shudder, but I nonetheless finished). As I learn more about what holds development back in Guinea, I become more and more convinced of the importance of girl’s education as a society-changing process. The result is that it is eleven-thirty at night and I am fired up about a project that won’t even really get started until the next school year, which starts in September or October. As such I heartily recommend it. It is not like those human interest books that leave you bored and feeling like they are just tooting their own horn.
Some volunteers do a larger funded project while at site, and it is possible that in line with the goal of education I will work with a village that is close by to get a school built, but that depends on them being willing to donate the labor and oversite for building it.
And as with everything I read these days, I can’t help but reflect on what it means for what I want my life to be like. It strikes me that a volunteer is rather vulnerable to brainwashing, being as hungry for ideas and stimulation as we get while waiting for things to get rolling (it is possible there are volunteers that don’t do any waiting, but it isn’t about being proactive, its about a culture of not being hurried). I feel like every time I read something I find myself thinking that the author has several good points and how does my own life look in relation to what they have to say? So if some nefarious agent of evil (or good, I suppose) wanted to reach a number of unusually receptive minds, he could do worse than send convincing literature our way.
As for Greg Mortenson and Three Cups of Tea, he seems to have done a lot at great personal sacrifice, and I find myself intimidated by that, but also inspired, because he did nearly all of it after the age of 30. I, quickly approaching 30 myself, sometimes find myself wondering if I haven’t missed my chance to do something really interesting. Fortunately I am doing something pretty interesting right now, but I have to find a way to keep that going when my time in Peace Corps is over, and how best to do that occupies a rather large portion of my thoughts.
