Bye Bye Buipe

As I mentioned in my last post, the focus of my work here is now changing. I have now moved out of Buipe and will be living in Tamale (sort of). My plans involve a fair amount of travelling so I will be a bit of a nomad for the next few weeks. Here is how things are looking and what I will be up to...

Next week: I am going to be meeting with some organizations that are working in water and sanitation in Tamale. My goal for these meetings is to get an idea of how different organizations approach working with the district governments and how this can possibly be improved. From what I saw in Buipe, organizations were taking care of water and sanitation work and the district water and sanitation team was completely non-functional (and there was no incentive for them to be more functional).

I will be spending the second part of next week and next weekend visiting a place called Fulfoso. This town was given a water system by UNICEF. I visited this town a few weeks ago and although I was told the system is working the water was not flowing (curious, very curious). I was told later that there were not only issues with the system, but that the committee formed to manage the system was also not functional...also not what was told to me when I visited the town. I am interested to live in this place for a few days and try to get a better sense of what is/isn't working and try to better understand the reasons why.

From there I will be spending two weeks visiting two other districts. The goal of these visits is to be able to compare the situation in these two districts with what I observed in Buipe. Both of these districts were a part of the same UNICEF project that was in Buipe. I am going to research how well their water and sanitation teams are functioning and try to learn how UNICEF has affected these teams.

Then it is time for report writing and final meetings. It is really crazy as I sit here to think that in a few weeks I will be thinking about wrapping up my placement. I am certain that the next month is going to fly by and it is looking like things are going to get busy. I am really looking forward to the next month and will be sure to keep you posted on my travels!