Hi all. I know, i've been a bit remiss in posting any info on what i've been up to. I guess that i'm not a very good blogger. Sorry about that. Well for now, i'll give you a description of my most recent trip "upcountry". The purpose of the trip was to disburse funds to groups of petty traders who already had ongoing busineses. The idea behind disbursing to a group is to generate peer pressure to prevent fraud. Since if one fails, we won't give additional funds to the group. The groups applied together and based on criteria such as location, number of youth in the group and whether they were members of Farmer Field Schools (another program), were selected. The disbursement will be Le 250,000 given in 2 tranches of Le 125,000. The first tranche, is what we distributed.

There were actually 2 disbursements occurring simultaneously. One in the north and the other in the east, Kailahun district specifically, where I worked. The drive out involves getting to Kenema first. This is a 4-5 hour drive on paved, unpaved gravel/dirt and potholes depending upon the location. The roads have actually improved dramatically from the first time I went out. Anyway, I spent the night in Kenema and the next morning headed over to the CRS office there. Salim and I were all set to go, but it turned out there was vehicle trouble, so we used the time to separate the money into individual envelopes of Le 125,000. After a 2 hour delay, we were finally on our way. First stop was Sgebwema to pick up our field agents. Sgebwema is about 1-2 hours away from Kenema and also has had major improvements in the dirt road, since my last visit.

We picked up our agents, Fati and Abigail, and headed off for our marathon session. In each town we had a routine. Find the village chief or contact, view the businesses/take photos of the business, gather the group in an enclosed private space (usually a house), describe the rules of the disbursement, have the group sign a contract and for the funds, take a picture of the group having received the funds then off to the next village which was sometimes up to 2 hours away from our location. We had 19 to do. Obviously this took several days. The fun part was the rules descriptions since Salim only speaks English and Krio and the villagers tended to mostly speak Mende (local tribe), his descriptions had to be translated from Krio to Mende.

The only problem we encountered in disbursing funds was that due to our late start, 2 groups had headed off to their farms by the time we got there around 3 or 4. This meant that we had to go back to these villages the next day. Not fun, when you consider the 1-2 hour distance between villages. Let me also mention that the 1-2 hour distance had far less to do with actual miles than the condition of the roads, if you can call them that. Some were footpaths, others were so eroded from the rainy season that it was extremely bumpy.

While disbursing, I spent the night in Sgebwema with Salim and other CRS staff. There is no electricity or running water there, but the house was cinder block and relatively comfortable. I did tend to go to bed early, not only because there was no electricity but also because we had to leave each morning around 6:30.

On my way back to Kenema, we had a flat tire, which isn't unusual, but I discovered that the jacks kept in the vehicles are too small for the Land Cruisers. You actually have to put the jack on a rock or something in order to lift it high enough to get the wheel off. That was pretty much the end of my busy week in Kailahun.

See below for a picture of the Land Cruisers that we use upcountry.