Final Project

This was the last day of our 3rd week at CBT. We had kept hearing about a Water Association in the village, but people kept telling us it didn't exist. Imagine our surprise when we discovered that Arik's host brother is the president of the well-functioning association! Our final project for training was to work with a local association to plan and carry-out a small project similar to something we will be doing when we get to our final sites. We'd been struggling to come up with something, given our lack of access to the school and and our supposedly defunct association.
We met with the association yesterday and decided to do a tree planting. Our main goal was to do something that would have a lasting impact on the community and we had kicked around a few ideas, but settled on the tree planting before we met with the association. They offered it up as an idea and we quickly started hammering out the details. By the end of our marathon meeting (it was at least 2.5 hours long) we had a plan.

The association would develop a list of families in the community and decide, based on need, how many trees each family would receive. We decided that each family would get at least 2 and as many as 5 trees. The association members also agreed to charge a small fee 3Dh per tree which the association would use to either purchase additional trees or do something else to benefit the community. We pushed for this "community contribution" because we wanted the community members to be vested in the success of their trees. We figured if we just handed them out, the trees might not receive the proper care they require. We were in charge of getting the trees.
PC gives us a budget of up to 2000Dh for our project and we planned to put all of that into purchasing trees. We would be paying about 15Dh per tree, so the sale was a good deal for the families in our village. We'll be gone from our CBT village for the next two weeks, so we have our fingers crossed that everything goes according to plan.