“When’s the next council meeting?”
This seemed to me like a simple question. The commune’s council meets regularly, and I’ve sat in on enough of them to know that they usually set the precise date for the next meeting at the end of each.
“Uhhh… you’ll have to ask the mayor. He’s in Konni today.”
“Will he be in tomorrow?”
“Uhh… I don’t know.”
Sigh. This really shouldn’t be difficult.
This is a common trend. The mayor is usually the only one in the mairie to know when meetings are happening, when NGOs are coming to visit, etc., and he is away on business fairly often; in Konni, in Tahoua, visiting another commune. So it is far too common to have what could be simple inquiries go unanswered.
But I had an idea: Some other volunteers had used blackboard paint to make perpetual calendars in their mairies. If I did this, and got people to use it, then both the municipal staff and the community at large would have a better idea of what was going on at the mairie. And maybe, just maybe, it would encourage planning beyond today, tomorrow, or (at best) next week?
Painting the thing proved more complicated than I anticipated, but I won’t cry over spilt…erm… paint. In the end it got done, and while the first couple of months the only thing written on it was my vacation, people have finally started posting meetings and NGO visits, and overall the reaction has been really positive.
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