WASH festival

Last April the ladies of the lake held 5 festivals educating our communities on HIV/AIDS and STDs. We felt the festivals were successful enough to hold another traveling festival about water, hygiene, ad sanitation (WASH). What we didn't anticipate was how much busier we would be at this point in service with less than 5 months remaining at site. We all had multiple other projects and the WASH festival really snuck up on us.

During the last festivals we biked to each site and almost completely around the region. This time we decided last minute to just taxi-brousse to each festival (we've biked around the region once, did we really need to do it again?), and I decided to just hold my festival and attend one other rather than participating in all four festivals.
My festival was a mess to put it lightly. It was held on a Wednesday and I found out on Monday that everyone had the wrong date thinking the festival would be on Friday. So the day before the festival I had to bike to the schools, gendarmes, and mayor's office to correct the date (and all before 8am because we distributed mosquito nets that day). Speaking of, Madagascar holds a mass mosquito net distribution every few years and this year was the biggest yet handing out 11 million nets for about 22 million people. The distribution dates for my region changed from September to the first two weeks in November crossing over the WASH festival in which we couldn't change the date. So only 6 out of 19 ACs were available to help with the festival.

The festival was scheduled to start at 2pm but started at 3pm which is to be expected. The location was different than the last festival and was not ideal. We asked health-related questions for prizes and the kids were pushing each other to be picked. There was not enough space for dances and the ACs had to use a stick to push the crowd back. The ACs each gave a talk about different WASH related topics and did demonstrations but we had to cancel the booths due to poor crowd control. The day was also hot (about 100 degrees), humid and looked like a storm was rolling in. PSI, a healthcare organization, brought a cinema-mobile and set up a movie which everyone seemed to enjoy and ended the festival around 8pm.

So things didn't go as planned but I was still proud of my ACs for giving demonstrations in front of roughly 600 people. I was much more relaxed during this festival since I'm farther along and service and I understand how important it is to just go with the flow. Maybe the festival wasn't exactly a success but that's how projects go in peace corps: some work out and some fall short. I was at least able to hold an event for the community, introduce the pumps/wells project on a large scale, and the doctor and ACs could educate on serious health issues in the community.

You know you're a PCV when:
-you've had a parasy (a parasite that buries into feet and lays eggs under the skin)
-despite no electricity you've watched more tv shows than in the states