line up

@Helen: Thanks for your kind comments Helen - encouraging! We facilitated a so called 'Food for Work' project. 3800 men cleaned up their own irrigation canals by digging out 75 km of sand and mud, an amazing feat. We provided wheat, oil and pulses to them during this work in the winter months. The reason was that their harvest had failed for the third year and there was very little food available to feed their families. The food was provided by the World Food Programme and we were committed to monitoring if everyone did the the work allocated to them. It involved regeularly showing up unannounced and listing the people working so we could confidently distribute the monthly food allocation to each person. We did it as transparently as possible; each person knew exactly how much they were entitled to, so powerful people in the villages could not keep allotments for themselves (if they had wanted to). These kinds of programmes are notorious for cheating, sadly, but it went really well this year. It was our first time to run such a programme, we are primarily involved in community development.
O yes, the sticks: they are shovels for digging the soil!