Thursday, September 9, 1976, 9:00 pm - Day 227

Tomorrow afternoon at 3:00 is going to be the first chance that these new volunteers get to see Les Galagher. I hope he is able to answer all of their questions and solve all of their problems. I think that the biggest question at the moment would be what about transportation. The old Puegoets were traded in for 5 new pick-up Isuzu's. These willhave to be portioned out. The XL 175's will go to the remaining engineers. There is enough to go around now, but when the 6 new VSO's come in and the 2 old VSO's come back from vacation, then there won't be enough. If I work it right, then maybe I'll be assigned a new pickup.

Yesterday, we had a soccer game. It was the engineers vs. the supervisors. The game turned out to be close, with the supervisors coming out ahead 5 to 4. We played two 30-minute halves on a full field. There were 8 people on each team. we had to do alot of running for alot of the time, so that everyone got good and tired. We all have sore muscles today.

Monday, September 27, 1976, 10:00 pm - Day 245

It turned out that I didn't get an Isuzu as I had hoped. I am still using the Honda XL 175 which I picked up in Bo at the beginning of the school.

We finally made it up to Daru on Monday night, and so Tuesday was the first day on the job. Everyone is staying at the two houses in Daru for the moment, but most of us have plans for moving out in the near future. I am still working out in Biawala where I was last year. Working with me is the new Peace Corps volunteer, Eddie Frichette. We will start moving things out to our new house in Mobai starting this week.

Sunday, October 3, 1976, 8:00 pm - Day 251

We crossed a few streams and one of them was about 3 feet deep and 10 to 15 feet wide. There was a log laying across, but it was about 6 inches below the water. This was the way I went across, getting my shoes wet. Eddie thought that he could jump over and so not get his feet wet. He went a ways back up the trail and proceeded to psyche himself up for the jump. When he was ready, he came racing towards the stream, but he forgot to jump. Instead, he kept running, and went right into the water, and ended up falling across to the other side, soaked to his neck. I almost died laughing.

I don't know how we managed it, but we were able to make it all of the way without once taking a wrong turn and getting lost. We had plenty of chances because there were lots of trails connecting with the one that we were on, and some of them looked alot like the right trail. I'm not sure that I would be able to go back the way that we had come without getting lost. Just sitting here thinking about it reminds me of those mazes that I used to make, which were made up of trails with Y junctions. It would be quite a job to cover all of the different trails around here to find out where they all go, and then make a map showing them all.

Yesterday we had another soccer game. This time it was the CARE engineers against the CARE workers. There were about 8 of us this time, and we filled it up with more workers to get up to 11 on each team. I was the team captain this time. It was a good game. It didn't rain, and the grass was good and dry, so I could stop or turn on a dime instead of slipping and sliding all over the place, like the other times. We engineers provided a good competition for our workers. We had a lot more opportunities to score than they did, but just couldn't find the goal. We ended up losing 2 to 1. Once the new VSO's show up, we should have enough engineers for a whole team. With enough practice and a little luck we should be able to even beat our workers sometimes. That would be quite an accomplishment, considering that they all grew up playing soccer, while most of us are pretty new at the game.

I seemed to be in shape this game. At the other game I would always be exhausted after a few minutes of running around. This time I was running around alot for the whole game, but never really felt tired. On the other side, two of the defensive players moved over to the forward positions to play offense, because they were getting too tired playing where they were. This was because our team was always putting pressure on them, in trying to score. Usually it is the offensive player who wants to move back to defense to get a chance to rest. This time it was different.

Sunday, October 10, 1976, 10:00 am - Day 258

I drove one of the new Isuzus last week. It was my first time that I drove a 4-wheel vehicle since I came in country. I have always been nervous and unsure of how I would do at driving a stick-shift on these roads. I was pleasantly surprised. No sooner had I started than I felt completely at ease, and all of my worries and fears that I had about my driving ability just faded away. Last Friday I got the truck and I spent the whole day driving it. I started out by going to Mobai to pick up our D7 bulldozer operator and a couple other workers. I had to transport them to where the D7 was doing bush clearing, which was on the Biawala-Sakiema-Mobai Road.

The road is 9 miles long, and the bulldozer is 4 miles from Mobai and coming closer each day. It took me 3 hours to cover the first 5 miles. This was because the truck got stuck 3 times. After that, I finally got the hang of driving in the mud, and took time to stop first before entering any bad spots, to plan out how and where I should and could cross over. The last 4 miles only took half an hour. All of the potholes were filled with water, and some of them were so deep that the truck would hit bottom while going by them.

When I reached Biawala, my workers informed me that the tractor was out of fuel, and so I had to go back to Daru and get a barrel of diesel. As soon as I made it back out to Biawala, it was time to go pick up the D7 operator. A few of my workers went with me, and together we made it all of the way back to Mobai over that bad road, and we only got stuck for one short time. I began to feel like I was ready for the Baja 500. Going through all of those bumps and muddy spots without getting stuck was an acomplishment in itself.

Friday afternoon we had another soccer game. It was CARE engineers and supervisors against our workers. This time we won 1 to 0, but we would have lost, had it not been for some superb playing by our goalie, Ernie, one of the new engineers. He made about 15 excellent saves during the game.

This is the big news now. As of next Monday, October 18, I will no longer be a CARE engineer. Skep and myself will be transfering over to a new program that Peace Corps is starting. This program is "Village Water Systems", and will consist of each one of us moving into a village, designing a water system for it, and then building it with communal labor. The water system will be getting water from a nearby source like a stream, and running it through a pipe into a storage tank in the village. from the storage tank, pipes will run out to different parts of the village, where standpipes (water taps) will be installed. It seems to be a very worthwhile project, and one that I could really get into.

It also seems a good idea for me to get out of CARE, also. There are about 20 volunteers around at the moment, and most of them feel that they are not doing anything very worthwhile at the moment. This is partly because the work season hasn't really gotten fully under way yet. At the moment, CARE does not have any of all of the new machines that they were planning on. This means that we are working on the same amount as last season, but have twice as many engineers to do the same job.

Another friction point that has been developing lately is transportation. There are no more trucks or motorcycles than there were last year, so some of the volunteers don't have their own transport, and so would be expected to share. This would be like two people per truck, which wouldn't be too bad. the thing that CARE is trying to start now is getting paid drivers for the trucks and using the motorcycles only for work. This would mean that for any socializing at night, we would have to go find the driver, and have him take you where you wanted to go. This would all be a great inconvience to us.

Another policy that CARE is trying to push is that one person is assigned a vehicle, and he cannot lend it to one of the other engineers to use. This would be bad, because those assigned to the trucks won't be needing them all of the time, and those assigned to motorcycles or without transport sometimes need to borrow a truck for their work. All of these things seem to me to show that CARE does not have or put confidence in its engineers. It's hard for me to work for someone that doesn't have confidence in me or my work, when I feel that I am doing a good job.

I will be spending this next week tying up all of my loose ends on the road work, getting everything set so Eddie could take over. Eddie has been working with me so far this season, and so now I think he can probably get the job done without me now.

On Sunday of Monday, Fred Hoyt will be picking Skep and me up in Daru, and then haul us and our things down to his house in Freetown. Fred has worked for CARE for two years already, and now for his third year he is heading up this water systems project for the Peace Corps. We will be staying in Freetown for awhile, but I don't know for how long or what we will be doing then.

The new VSO's are in country now. VSO's are the British volunteers. There are 5 of them, and they came about two weeks ago. Two of them are mechanics and the other three are civil engineers, including one female engineer. They have been kept in Bo, plotting the survey notes from the roads, and are all disheartened with the arrangement now, and want to come up to Daru and start to work.

Another Peace Corps volunteer has come into the country a few days ago. His name is Ben Tate and he is from San Jose. We came into Bo on Saturday, and it seems that on Friday night Ben might have cut his stay with CARE short before it even got underway. Rudy Ramp, CARE's director, and alot of other people, were at the Rio Restaurant in Bo, and Ben Tate entered the discussion. He informed Rudy Ramp and the others that he needed transportation because he was going to commute to work. He was going to be working in Daru and he wanted to commute from Bo! He said that he wasn't going to live in the "bush", and that CARE couldn't tell him where to live, because this wasn't the army. Rudy Ramp tried to reason with Ben and get him to calm down, but it didn't work, and Ben Tate misunderstood him and called Rudy a racist (Ben is black). Ben asked him if he wanted to fight. Rudy got up to leave because he was insulted, and ben Tate interpretted it as meaning that Rudy wanted to fight. I guess that was as far as it went that night. The next morning, there were alot of different meetings, all about what had happened the night before, and what should be done about Ben. It turned out that he was brought back to Freetown on Saturday afternoon. There is a chance that he might be terminated, but maybe they will try to fit him into another program in Peace Corps. I don't think that CARE wants him back.