Tale of Two Villages – Part 3

After returning from my visa run, a week of snow and ice kept us grounded. I busied myself around the office, and prepared for a new project by studying hydrogeology, aquifers, cones of depression, and well physics. By midweek, I was really itching to get back to the two villages.

I organized and led a full day's worth of training for the entire organization, and by the end of it, we had factory workers wanting to make village trips. When the freeze let up, we went down to Yuan Jiang, and I brought along four others – two from the factory so they could put what they learned into practice. Mok was unable come with us, so all the driving fell to me. The trip was full jokes and laughter, and of course some game planning.



Yuan Jiang turned out to be a disaster. Their pipes were steel - rusted, leaking, unburied, and many laid across roads. We evaluated their present system in the village, and found it to be terribly designed, with many instances of pipes doubling back. New pipes and a new design were required, using better material and technique, so our goal was to convince them to use PE pipes, which are cheaper than steel and can last for 50 years rather than 15 to 20.

Over lunch, dinner, and two meetings, we tried everything. Nothing worked. We listened to their thoughts on the materials, and then told them what we knew to be true from experience. We showed them samples, and showed a simple budget comparison based on our measurements. PE would require 200RMB from each family, steel required 700RMB. We explained that we didn't want to waste their money on a short term fix, and that we wished for lasting health for them and their children. The leaders wouldn't budge, and we were left wondering why. A few reasons help to explain the stubbornness:

1. They are accustomed to getting handouts from the local government

Last year during a drought, they ran out of water and it was brought in on trucks every day for three months. Then, the government gave them steel pipes to connect to two new water sources, but never taught them how to use a straw material that keeps joints from leaking (like Teflon tape).  This reliance on outside help caused them to see us much in the same way, so they never were prepared to pay a buck. No wonder the budget comparison fell on deaf ears.

2. Election day was coming soon

Over dinner, Village Director Bai Fu had a little too much white liquor, and blamed his villagers for being too ignorant to understand PE pipes. In our discussion, he let a telling statement slip: “Kao, you have to understand a difference between China and America – here, our leaders have to be voted in unlike in your country, where they can lead if they have money.” I couldn't help but laugh. The US does have its fair share of corruption and flaws, but he had it backwards. I was ready to launch a full on defense of our Democratic system, but would have been pointless. More important was the point he was making: he feared that if he pushed for PE over steel, his “wen mang” (people with no education or culture) would never re-elect him to another 3 year term.

3. They simply didn't trust us

This is what it really came down to. To them, we were outsiders, no different from government officials who usually have ulterior motives for working in the villages. They simply could not believe that people would put up money and give suggestions simply for their good of other people. They blocked themselves and their villagers from getting the help they truly needed.

With no final agreement, we turned in for the night. Everybody was miserable. We were disappointed in them for not seeing the truth, and in ourselves for not being able to show it to them. We planned on heading out at the crack of dawn, but a talk with Mok gave us a new plan, and some hope. He explained to me that sometimes, it takes months or years to improve the relationship to a point where we can actually help a community. This became our new goal, and we made the call to stay an extra half-day to walk the village, door-to-door. By learning their true concerns, we could start building trust and discover other ways to work with them. We found we could help by teaching them to repair leaks and how to build a sedimentation tank to prevent the clogging of pipes. The visit had not been a waste, but still the feeling was bittersweet. I suppose the speed of progress doesn’t depend on how bad I want it. An observation from Dorothy Day in the 1930s, on the slow pace of social change:

"What we do is so little that we may seem to be constantly failing... And why must we see the results of our giving? Our work is to sow - another generation will be reaping the harvest."

To be continued…

My goofy team