Proposals

The latest rage in the second of my worlds is proposals. I do not know where all the money is coming from, but everybody and their uncle seems to be writing proposals for funding. Even in the village they recently made a proposal for government funding to repair a roadside canal that has been leaking all over the road for the last 10 years, and to repair the road that has been damaged by the water.

A lady who teaches at a public high school said that her school had recently put together a proposal for a computer lab for the school. She had suggested asking for flash drives as well and they got them. Another village wrote a proposal for 2000 cacao seedlings and got them. This has now gotten them all excited about writing funding proposals for other things.

Friends in other areas though, were more gloomy about the current rage of proposal writing, citing many proposals wrtten, projects started and not finished, people neglecting their jobs, neglecting the maintainance of their farms or other livelihood because of the glitter of easy money through writing proposals. They fear a big let down when the free money stops, which inevitably it will some day.

A particularly hare-brained proposal I heard about at the provincial level is the plan to build a sugar cane processing factory in the driest village in the province which also happens to sit right smack on the main tectonic fault line. There is plenty of hot sulphur water available but not fresh water. There is currently no sugar cane available so the plan is apparently to deforest a large remote mountain valley and convert the whole thing to 10,000 hectares of sugar cane fields. That valley is currently only accessible by 5 hours of hiking from the end of the road so massive amounts of money will be required to build roads. Then all that sugar cane will have to be transported over major mountains to get to the dry village where the processing factory is to be built. Instead of building the factory on the coast downriver from the valley where water is abundant, they decided to cross over two ranges of higher mountains upstream and build it 30 km inland and then will have to transport sugar another 45 km to the nearest seaport.

The factory is also supposed to produce biofuel and other substances for a total of 7 products. Biofuel is the latest rage in the west and apparently there is big money available for funding. Usually the budget for road building is twice the actual cost because of all the pilfering that is expected to occur. So I can see the attraction of all that money and all that, uh, opportunity.