Great Meeting

Today I had a fantastic meeting with my counterpart, the mayor of my village, Oleg. I wish we had held this meeting two weeks ago when I first arrived, but perhaps I wouldn’t have been ready for it – with my language, inability to ask the right questions due to lack of knowledge of the village, and the potential for my brain to overload after hearing too much new information too quickly. Anyway, I’m glad we had this meeting and I look forward to having more of them.

Oleg unfolded a huge map of the village on his table and explained the towns problems to me, pointing out where certain things were that he mentioned. There were the roads he wanted to pave, those paved during the Soviet Union, the paved roads completed recently by the mayors office – some with asphalt and some in the white method (large blocks of concrete), and the ones paved by the kalhouz (town council) which conveniently run in front of family members of kalhouz officials…

There were the garbage dumps that I didn’t know existed on two ends of the town and there were the ones that had already been filled, capped, and planted over with trees. He mentioned that no one takes their garbage to the dump because it’s too far away and the option presented by USAID for metal dumpsters and a garbage truck was too expensive and maybe we could come up with a more creative and cheaper solution.

We talked about the fact that the system that used to bring water into half of the 2200 homes in this village is essentially broken because the pipes are from 1961. There are no meters to measure water use, and thus its use (when it worked) was free and so people used too much in the summer for their gardens and there was no money to fix things when they broke. So perhaps if the system could be repaired and meters attached to individual homes, people would use water more conservatively and a sustainable source of revenue would cover the upkeep of the system.

There’s an abandoned movie theater that Oleg would like to see turned into a youth center with an internet café and abandoned lot he’d like to turn into a park. He thinks a youth organization would have an easier time getting funding for such projects than the mayor’s office – and I agree – and that my soon-to-be-created English Club could be the perfect vehicle for that. Perfect, I think – I want the English Club to actually do things rather than just sit around and watch American films.

There’s the tree nursery that he already started at the two schools and the forest beyond the town borders to where the trees are transplanted when their about a foot tall. There’s a public bath house that was built as a private enterprise and hopefully will start working next year. There are the street lights he’d like to hang and a new cemetery he’d like to build. There are computers and computer programs he’d like to get for his accountants so they’re not wasting loads of time using calculators and white out.

In other words, there’s a lot of stuff to do and I need not be worried about finding work, which to be honest is often a PCV’s darkest nightmare and sometimes sad reality. It is actually possible to be a PCV who reads a lot of books for two years and I really don’t want to be him.