Renovate to Motivate: Providing Child Remands With Space to Create, by Jenn Hollern

Most children in Mombasa, Kenya take advantage of free primary education, enjoy playing football in sandy parks, and have ambitions of being a doctor, lawyer, or business leader. But during my time working for a local NGO, Muslims for Human Rights (MUHURI), I have found many “street kids” who face the realities of the legal system after being unjustly charged with ‘loitering’ or falsely accused of stealing. Unfortunately, the justice system in Kenya lacks an institution to handle juvenile cases, so organizations like MUHURI are stepping in to direct children out of adult prisons during the trial process and provide them with legal assistance.

A Remand Home for Children was recently constructed just outside of Mombasa city, helping to house youth under 16 for the duration of their trials. Situated on a sand lot less than ½ an acre, it consists only of 2 large cinder-block buildings and 2 more under slow construction – an atmosphere that lacks the hope or encouragement necessary to motivate troubled children. After speaking with the Home manager and learning of MUHURI’s work, it is not difficult to understand the challenges of finding volunteer teachers to instruct 65 remanded kids or provide beneficial activities without proper facilities. In order to ensure time in the Remand Home is constructive and used to jumpstart their return into the community, I have constructed a project to renovate the ‘dining hall’ into a multi-functional room, complete with a chalkboard, removable tables, and shelving for storage of art supplies and school materials for youth.

My first visit to the home was shortly after MUHURI provided paper and pencils for kids to draw with, and I have never seen young people so excited to show off their artistic skill: I was overwhelmed with great sketches and pictures about the prevention of AIDS or saying no to drugs. Not only did this small contribution provide hours of entertainment, but also gave distressed teens a creative outlet for frustrations with challenges in their lives. It is our hope that involving these bright, talented youth in reconstructing the dining hall, offering them the chance to draw murals and help repaint the facility, we can offer something more than a physical structure for gathering: we want this space to provide the type of motivation, education, and information (through Human Rights Workshop) that the children of Mombasa need to reintegrate into the community.

After the project is complete, we will work to secure regular visitors – leaders from the surrounding area – to come speak and support the remand children through their trials. Interviews with the youth show that one of the most encouraging aspects of their week comes with representatives of MUHURI walk through the gate, staying to talk about the conditions of their stay or status of their trials. Bringing teachers, aid workers, or successful community members into the lives of these enthusiastic, but misguided, children is the best remedy to a history of bad experiences. With the addition of books and other school supplies, the renovations of the dining hall will also facilitate a peer-educational atmosphere where kids can help one another with studies, ensuring they do not fall behind in school. Experience tells us that such proactive approaches will help stop the cycle of repeat offenders that often plague Kenyan youth.

Color in the Graphs, by Morel Jones

When I signed up to work with a development NGO in India, I had very romantic notions of what my experience would be like. In February 2008, I began working with an agricultural development organization called Krishi Vigyan Kendra (KVK), which is partially staffed by scientists and works to improve the livelihoods of farming families and empower rural women and youth. In my mind, I imagined an organization full of individuals who were passionate about organic farming, dedicated to caring for the land, and intent on building good rapport with farming communities.

My experience at KVK has turned out very differently from what I expected. The first few weeks I spent mostly trying to figure out everything that went on at the organization and how it all functions. I found myself sorting through project “documentation” – piles of ratted notebooks full of scribbled Hindi. Often my search for information at KVK would be interrupted by lengthy questions about the freckles on my arms, or Monica Lewinsky.

With time, I developed my own research project on gender roles and decision-making power in agriculture in an effort to better sensitize KVK’s project towards the specific needs of women farmers. Though my coworkers were confused as to what I expected to gain out of a project that did not involve graphs and charts, I pressed on.

Once my project methodology was completed, I headed to my selected village and began making friends. I lived with a family, slept on their roof under the stars, wow-ed the village with my chapatti-making skills over the kitchen fire, and washed clothes in the river. But I quickly learned that I was not going to find a magical way for KVK to empower farming women. In essence, though my research idea and methodology were good, I learned that one doing the research should have been someone else besides myself.

Indeed, I concluded that only field staff – people from or living in the village – would be able to have truthful, meaningful conversations with reserved Rajasthani villagers about major problems in their lives, relationships with spouses, and household decision-making power. I, a wealthy, educated, foreign woman, cannot do that very successfully. Likewise the wealthy, educated, upper-caste staff at KVK, who conduct interviews in full suits and eat their lunch separately from the villagers, cannot do so very well either.

My project supervisor was not sad to see me let go of my gender analysis project, as she couldn’t quite grasp how I was going to graph my findings anyway. Now for the last two months of my internship, I will spend my time interviewing farmers and writing case studies of KVK program successes and failures. KVK wants written case studies for use in their Powerpoint presentations at annual meetings. My hope is that the stories I write and leave behind will put a human face on the agricultural development programs, giving color and emotion to the black and white numbers that fill their annual reports. Perhaps it will encourage future, deeper conversations with the farmers who are the beneficiaries of these development programs.

In the end, my frustration with the privilege of development work in India was only exacerbated by the knowledge that I cannot do anything to change that in the course of my 6-month internship. But it is possible that I have started to help it. And maybe after repeated encounters with FSD interns, KVK will begin to alter the way they go about development work. For my part, if nothing else, my internship has shown me first hand the potential, the limitations, and overall the harsh reality of development in the third world. And for that it has all been worth it.

Clean Water and Appropriate Technology, by John Allen

Over the past few months, FSD intern John Allen has been involved in water development efforts in Jinja, Uganda. John’s internship has been hosted by Busoga Trust, an organization that seeks to extend the coverage of safe drinking water and sanitation to rural communities in Uganda. With his background in Civil Engineering, John has been working actively with the technical team at Busoga Trust to serve communities by facilitating the construction of shallow well sources. This has improved the health of residents in communities like Igombe, where villagers have worked together to construct a clean water source.

With some exposure to water development before coming to Uganda, I thought I had a decent understanding of the use of appropriate technology. Then I arrived at Busoga Trust and discovered something that confused me. I was disappointed to find out that my host organization preferred to implement hand-dug wells to boreholes. I was perplexed by the “slight compromise in quality” present in hand-dug wells, as was explained by my supervisor. Of course, the organization’s reasoning behind constructing so many shallow well sources was simple; they are about one fourth the cost of a borehole. Nevertheless, I was not completely satisfied with my supervisor’s explanation, but I began my work in the field ready to oversee hand-dug well construction. It wasn’t until I first arrived at Igombe community for needs assessment that I fully understand my organization’s philosophy. A couple of Igombe residents took to me to the bottom of the hill to inspect the community’s “traditional water source.” This was no more than a rainwater runoff pond completely open to contamination from nearby livestock. At this point I realized that by constructing cheaper shallow wells, the impact of water development efforts would be maximized by serving more communities, and that a hand-dug well was infinitely better than the water sources rural communities accessed. Later, during the process of constructing the well, I understood another important reason for why shallow wells are constructed. Through the process of building their own well source, I was able to observe the residents of the village come together as a community. With each villager having his own tasks and responsibilities the community was able to work as a team with the knowledge that upon completion of their collective work, the village would benefit from better health that would result from the completion of a safe water source. This was further reflected in the interest garnered in health education sessions, as community members learned how they could take an active role to ensure their own health and that of their children. All of these activities of the community transformed my opinion of water development works, as I came to the realization that the technology which promotes community involvement and capacity building and has the widest impact range is the most sustainable.

An Entrepreneur Network, by Jennifer Drapisch

Over the past 6 months I have worked with Centro de Entrenamiento para la Producción (CEP). They are an NGO established to assist small and medium sized businesses (PYMES) through technological development and business training. The Argentine government recently created subsidies and tax credits aimed at increasing the competitiveness of Argentine PYMES. CEP acts as a window for these programs by assisting in paperwork and requirement fulfillment. They also manage the government sponsored training programs, by designing course content and allocating in-house instructors. Another side project at CEP involves supporting two new inventions to market, including a novel suspension system for cars or machinery, recently patented in the Europe and U.S., as well as, a new energy efficient windmill, still in the design and prototype construction stage.

My greatest accomplishment with this organization was built around a personal idea utilizing their resources to create a consulting and training project within the marginalized areas of the local community. It allowed me to directly work with and help at least 20 individuals while truly left a legacy in Argentina! For about 2 months I networked, sympathized and analyzed a mountain of information with a large number of people all over the city from social movements and cooperatives to entrepreneurial assistance groups. Through this research, I was able to write and win a grant proposal for a consulting project working with a few local comedors in Buenos Aires province leading workshops in social entrepreneurship for cooperatives. The project was a pilot program aimed specifically at social cooperatives in local comedors¹.

These cooperatives formed out of a need for resources in the comedors as well as a desire by local women for respectable work close to home. One of the participating cooperatives was still in the organization stage buying start-up materials for their bakery through a grant received by another FSD intern and were in need of a how-to business plan. The other participating cooperative is a sewing group which began a little over one year ago. They were dependent on NGO support and lacked organization, management and sales volume. Through the information gathered in the needs assessment as well as assistance from CEP and other NGO specialist organizations, five strategic workshops were designed in team building, accounting, marketing, costs and operations.

Most of these “entrepreneurs” had low levels of formal education and a few were illiterate, making the design and substance challenging. To my great surprise, after utilizing a few comic strips, pictures, diagrams and role play examples, the women participated comfortably and discussed a lot of interesting ideas and opportunities.

The final workshop was a small discussion group, bringing together the two cooperatives with another well known cooperative group in the local area. During this workshop they not only shared experiences of best practices, challenges faced and advice, but they networked together and will now sell to one another. As a special guest, two men from La Obra de Padre Cajade shared their experiences. The Obra is a well known and very large social entrepreneurial group in the province. All of the cooperative groups chatted back and forth sharing stories and asking interesting questions about the others work. It was the perfect networking session as I really think they learned from each other. At the end of the workshop, they even coordinated to work with and buy from each other! The sewing cooperative and bakery found a new client in Padre Cajade. As a supplement to the classes, I created a 50 page manual in Spanish and using many pictures and examples. The manual goes into a bit more in depth on all of the subjects covered in the workshops and includes a section on common mistakes and general advice. I assembled an appendix providing extra entrepreneurial and community resources as well as a section of fair trade national and international organizations. The manuals were distributed to each of the participating women and to the representatives of the Obra. Copies were also given to various NGOs with hopes of further distributing to those in need of the information.

During the final discussion, my co-workers from the other departments of CEP began discussing the project. My direct boss proudly told them of all my hard work and showed them a copy of the comprehensive manual. Through this connection, all areas of CEP jointly expressed interest that future FSD interns will continue the workshops to reach more cooperatives as part of a community outreach program for the NGO!!!

In the end and all of my hard work, multiple marathon miles of walking and hours of planning and writing paid off. The manual is my pride and joy and will help many people even after I am gone. By giving personal attention to each cooperative and working directly to help shape their individual business models, I was able to teach them practical skills increasing their organizational desires, personal work ethic and a more dynamic understanding of their companies and themselves. They in turn, taught me a great deal about bravery, flexibility and tenacity.

Amid both success and challenge, I became incredibly humbled and found a sense of irony in the ultimate simplicity of it all. Some of the women could not read or write and most never finished primary school, but all shared their experiences and learned from one another. This manner of collaboration and education has laid the groundwork for a network of social commerce services. These lasting memories are a true sense of pride and fulfillment that can only come by teaching and learning from others.

Information about the groups this project was able to directly reach:

Estrategia & MTD

This link is a video explaining the MTD movement. For those that cannot understand the Spanish, the pictures explain a lot.

Estrategia is one of the Comedor cooperatives involved in the training workshops. They are a part of the MTD movement as explained in the link above. This movement basically fights for the rights of unemployed workers. I was able to sit in on a members meeting, where as activists they discussed not only “lobbying” options, but also an array of community support activities. Estrategia is part of the community service arm of MTD, officially a separate community comedor. As mentioned previously, another FSD inter, Arvil Antonio Gonzales was able to help assemble a local bakery business to not only support the comedor but the local community and many excited local women bakers. They received a mixed material oven from another NGO, which can use anything as fuel, including old newspapers or wood scraps mixed with grass and weeds. This business is ideal because of its location within the villa or township area of the city and the needs of the community for local commerce. Their bread is made from a Bolivian recipe, which is reflective of the heredity of the neighborhoods residents. Not only this buy the bread can be cheaply made and has a unique exceptional flavor. Yum!

Arco Iris, Working World and Otro Mercado
http://www.theworkingworld.org/?action=market&subsection=Pet%20clothes

Arco Iris already had a relatively structured business system in place and new infrastructure. This sewing cooperative specializes in dog clothing but has been able to accommodate special orders, such as messenger bags and babies clothing. Through a micro finance loan, they purchased beautiful new high-tech sewing machines, on which they have all been trained, significantly increasing the quality of their products! This cooperative lacks a bit of direction and organizational structure as well as consistent sales. They also seem to have a high reliance on outside NGO assistance and I believe the workshops have brought them closer to independence.

Working world also known as “La Base,” is a micro finance organization which provided the loan for the new sewing machines and works closely with them offering advices and acting as a middleman, selling their products online. The link above shows their line of dog clothing, which is of fairly high quality. I was impressed by their attention to detail and concern for quality control. Their outfits come in both polar fleece and cotton and vary in styles. They are extremely cute and well-made so if you have a small dog click on the link above and buy some!!

The cooperative is currently in the process of connecting with the international fair trade movement through an Italian company called, Otro Mercado, who happens to have a retail store in downtown La Plata. This provided the opportunity to cover the fair trade objectives in the operations workshop as well as the final discussion. Many resources to this movement were provided in the appendix of the manual as a very strong and secure option for many social cooperatives.

Obra de Padre Cajade
obradelpadrecajade.org.ar

This organization was started by a priest who left an amazing legacy and a strong system of community support to continue his work. The Obra is very well-known and a very large social entrepreneurial presence in the province of Buenos Aires. It includes three orphanages hosting various ages of children and five social businesses. The amazing concept of these businesses is that they are used as a form of apprenticeship teaching above the education they receive in the orphanage. The profits from these businesses are all reinvested into the orphanages to create more opportunities for the children. Definitely check out their website, although it’s only in Spanish but if you can read it, you cannot help but be impressed! Representatives attended the final discussion and shared insight based on their past experiences.
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1 Comedors are NGO community assistance programs located in the most impoverished areas of the country, which provide food, education and other support activities for the community.

An Untouchable, Indestructible Army, by Casey Lord

Casey Lord is interning with Sambhali Trust in Jodhpur, India, an NGO whose mission is to empower Harijan (“untouchable”) women by providing them with an environment free from discrimination and home duties where they can learn new skills in sewing, embroidery and basic English. Casey is particularly involved with the sewing initiative of the trust and is hoping to use her time In Jodhpur to strengthen the trust’s sustainability by improving the market prospects for Sambhali’s handicrafts.

Fighting the mounting summer temperatures of the Thar desert, I carefully wrapped, pleated and pinned my new cotton sari into position this morning in preparation for another meeting with Jodhpur bureaucracy. Saraswati has checked my tucks and folds and given me a red bindi - I look the part and I’m ready to go. Today I am going to the police station on behalf of a local Harijan woman whose life has been turned upside-down by her betraying, polygamist husband and in-laws. Pinkie’s husband has married and had a child with a fourteen-year old girl, bringing his ‘new family’ into the home where Pinkie and her children already live. The in-laws, also sharing the house, are favoring the ‘new family’ and are abusing Pinkie in an attempt to expel her. Pinkie has nowhere to go and has no control over the situation. I will stand with six other (also Harijan) women and protest for her basic right to a life without threat or violence.

This is not exactly an average day of my internship, but it’s certainly not unusual. There are forty-five participants who meet daily at Sambhali Trust but the outreach of the project is somewhat larger. Govind, the trust’s founder, is an incredibly dedicated and passionate man who is entirely committed to the welfare of these girls. His efforts overflow the trust’s permeable boundaries and touch the lives of the girls’ families and other needy members living in the community. The girls at the trust are encouraged to stand up for themselves, act on their own initiative and ultimately build a sense of worth and solidarity so deeply rooted that it will stay with them when they leave the project and bear fruit to a life more successful than that of their parents. Thus, when Pinkie approached Govind in dire straights she met not only a man who would refuse to turn her away but an army of forty-five young girls all ready to fight for her cause.

I am almost halfway through my nine-week internship and have had the opportunity to learn a great deal about working with a grassroots organization and have become fully immersed in the local culture. I’m reaching a transitional stage of applying what I have learnt about the needs of the trust and its participants into a personal project, a project that coheres with the trust’s mission and serves to increase its sustainability. Quality control and rigorous management are recurrent problems that NGOs with a sewing program face everyday, and I hope that my Western background can bring an alternative light into the organization. By researching successfully established organizations in the region Sambhali can develop a model on which to base its growth, and as the organization evolves into a self-sustainable project it can endeavor to support its participants even once they have left.

Govind has great dreams about the future of Sambhali and its sister organizations and I feel very excited to be a part of the realization of these dreams. I am grateful to FSD for providing me with the opportunity to work with such a special organization, to form a mutual relationship of new knowledge and experience, and for allowing me to join forces with a very unique army of empowered women.

Incubating Microfinance Institutions in Southern Rajasthan, by Dave Bullon Patton

I arrived in Rajasthan in September ready to learn about microfinance. I was dissatisfied with my previous life in the corporate world, and was yearning to do something meaningful and deeply fulfilling with my life over the next 8 months. Seven months later, my mind has begun to discover the intricately multifaceted nature of development work and my heart has found a life-long passion for alleviating poverty.

I have been working with ACCESS Development Services, an Indian non profit company, which has a presence in several Indian states. ACCESS partners with local Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to upgrade the livelihoods of India’s poorest and develop local financial services that can support their income generating activities. I’ve been working with a microfinance consultant, a livelihoods consultant, an administrative assistant and our fearless team leader. I have been involved with various projects, but I will focus on my involvement with the Microfinance Insititution (MFI) incubation project.

I have learned about the steps involved in incubating MFIs by helping the team incubate the first 8 MFIs in the region. So, what have I actually been doing? I have participated in Institutional Capacity Assessment Tests; written Business Development Plans, funding proposals and operations manuals; organized workshops; participated in exposure visits, developed management information systems (MIS); and trained MFI staff on various financial, human resource and microfinance concepts. At the Towards Sustainable MFIs workshop that I was asked to organize, we spent 2 days walking the participants through critical concepts that they must master to become self sustaining organizations.

In order to reinforce some of the concepts shared through workshops, we organized an exposure visit to a well established MFI, the Maha Shakti Fountation (MSF), on the other side of the country. It was a long train ride! Below, on the left, the partners are learning to use MSF’s sophisticated MIS. On the right we are visiting a family that runs a very successful vegetable farm with a working capital loan from MSF. This exposure visit made a world of difference as vague theoretical concepts became concrete action plans in participants’ minds. Listening to MSF’s history gave participants the confidence to move forward. If they could do it, so can we!

While group learning is very helpful, an important part of my role has been visiting partner organizations to give their microfinance staff one-on-one support as they gain confidence with some of the concepts shared in workshops. We have spent a lot of time with microfinance program directors such as Jayesh from PROGRESS (pictured below in red). One year ago Jayesh didn’t even know the meaning of the acronym MFI. At this point he is an empowered manager with ambitious expansion plans. On the left, I was enjoying some chai, while reviewing PROGRESS’ Operations Manual with Jayesh and Nomesh. On the right, Jayesh is appraising one of the lending groups that is benefiting from PROGRESS’ microfinance program. These 11 women are an example of the poor people that microfinance aims to help by providing contextualized savings, credit and insurance products that can support their livelihoods.

As a team, our efforts over the past 7 months have enabled our partner NGOs to disburse an additional USD 125,000, giving over 1000 men and women in Southern Rajasthan access to a microloan. I am thrilled to have been a part of transforming the lives of those people! By interacting with consultants, managers, bankers, funding agencies, government officials and clients I have learned that microfinance is a small part of a larger package of solutions that must be delivered together in order to make a lasting impact. I am grateful to ACCESS because the experience that I have gained in India has prepared me for my next role as a research assistant in microfinance and livelihoods in Peru. Thank you FSD for putting me in touch with such a great organization!

A Way Forward, by Rebecca Regan-Sachs

I am volunteering in Jinja, Uganda, with the Phoebe Educational Fund for AIDS Orphans and Vulnerable Children (PEFO). Part of my work involves administering a vocational school that PEFO established in December 2007 in order to help young women who had had to leave school early because they could not afford the school fees.

There are 12 students at the school, all between the ages of 16 and 23. Many of their parents died of AIDS, and they are being cared for by their grandmothers. In addition, about half of the young women are mothers themselves, and struggle to provide for the many dependents in their families. The opportunity to learn a marketable skill—in this case, tailoring—is a potentially life-changing one for them.

I was startled one night a couple months ago to receive a phone call from one of the young women at the PEFO vocational center. The reason they don’t have cell phones or the ability to make frequent pay phone calls is more or less the reason they’re in this program: they’re extremely poor.

But there was one of my brightest students, “Sarah,” 23, on the other end of the line one evening. I greeted her with pleasant surprise.

“Madam, I can’t come to class tomorrow,” she said. Her voice was muffled by the static of the pay phone line.

“Oh…well that’s okay, Sarah. It’s no problem. Thanks for telling me, though.” As an afterthought: “Is everything all right?”

She paused. “Madam, our family is visiting tomorrow for my son. Last week he fell sick, and he was lost.”

That couldn’t be right. Sarah has a five-year-old daughter and two-year-old son, and they are the joys of her life—especially since her husband left the family a year ago for another woman, which she talks about with lingering bitterness and pain.

“He is lost? What do you mean?”

Her voice seemed to grow fainter. “He was sick very suddenly, and we took him to the hospital, and on the way…he lost his life.” She added: “So I will not be at the school tomorrow.”

I was suddenly overflowing with condolences, offers to help, profound apologies—all of which sounded empty and clichéd as I uttered them. And just then, her phone credit ran out and the line went dead.

I spent the rest of the night alternating between attempting to call her back and fighting back my own tears. Child mortality rates in developing countries are shocking by Western standards, but they’re still little more than numbers on a page until one of the most intelligent, prepossessing young women you meet in one of those countries has the light abruptly sucked out of her life.

The next day, another PEFO staffer and I drove into her village, down bumpy, red-dirt roads lined with banana trees and mud huts in front of which children shrieked and played. Each one must have been a reminder to Sarah of what she had lost.

She was waiting for us on the side of the road, at a neighbor’s house. She smiled the same smile I saw every day at the vocational school, as if nothing were wrong. I got out of the car and gave her our gifts of bread, tea and sugar. Then, not knowing what else to do, I put my arms around her and told her I was sorry.

And then she began sobbing quietly. “Madam—I have lost all my hope.” She shook her head as tears streamed down her cheeks. “I miss my child.”

We spent the rest of the day back at her house, chatting with her neighbors and family members, playing with her little daughter (who Sarah kept obsessively by her side the whole day), and walking out to see the fields where she cultivates corn, beans, cassava and potatoes.

One of the neighbors pulled out a photo album at one point, and showed me Sarah’s late son. He was, by any measure, a beautiful child. He had his older sister’s same shy smile and his mother’s large, bright-alive eyes. At that point, after doing her best to talk and laugh with her visitors throughout the day, Sarah began brushing away tears. The neighbor quietly put away the album.

Soon after that day, the vocational project really took off; we began making deals with local schools to buy school uniforms en masse from our young vocational tailors, ensuring a potentially enormous, sustainable market for this class and all future classes. Every day I visited the school, the girls had made new skirt and shirt designs and hung them proudly on the walls. And I was starting to see a new confidence in the way the girls carried themselves—a new spark in their eyes.

Sarah continued as she always had—energetic, inquisitive and determined. She made no reference to her dead son, never faltered when other students brought their young children to the school with them for the day. But I continually wondered and worried about her state of mind.

A couple months after my visit to the village, we learned about a two-day finance and bookkeeping workshop being held in Jinja. Since the young women would be starting their own tailoring business together after graduating the vocational school, it was critical that some of them have a sophisticated grasp of accounting. (We hold periodic “Entrepreneurship” lessons at the school, but we only cover the basics.)

PEFO could only manage to pay for one young woman to attend the workshop. I thought back to all those “Entrepreneurship” classes, to the hand that was raised the most frequently, to the person who asked all those questions I often struggled to answer, to the young woman who listed seven subjects—including accounts and commerce—when asked what her favorite classes in school had been.

I met Sarah on the morning of the workshop and guided her to the hotel conference room where the lectures were being held. She was easily the youngest person there, and her simple attire stood in stark contrast to the business suits and tailored dresses of the other participants in the room.

“Now, don’t be afraid to ask questions,” I told her (though I could imagine no such thing), “and think about how this will apply to your business. You will have to use this knowledge in just a few weeks!”

She nodded, oddly quiet, and I realized she was quite nervous. “You’ll do great!” I added, and then left her to the workshop. Well, I thought, at least she’ll get some good food.

The rest of that week at PEFO, we rushed to solidify plans for the vocational students’ graduation: we picked out a place for them in their local village to set up their business, we signed up more schools to buy uniforms by the hundreds, and we began recruiting the second class in what (I hope) will be a long line of groups to have their quality of life improved significantly by acquiring the means and skills to earn a decent living for their families.

The next week, I dropped by the school and learned of all the progress the girls had been making recently. But I was especially eager to hear how Sarah had fared in her workshop.

“I will show you,” she said. She took out a notebook and opened it to a page of complex tables and figures. “This is the [incomprehensible term to me] method of accounting,” she began. And then she flipped to the next page, and the next—countless pages of meticulous notes—explaining everything she had learned in the workshop.

“At the end of the class, we had an exam on everything they taught us,” she said. “And they awarded certificates to those who passed.” At this point, she pulled out a glossy, laminated certificate with her name on it and showed it to me. “Only 18 passed.”

“How many were in the class?” I asked.

“Forty-two.”

Suddenly I felt tears spring to my eyes. I picked up her certificate and stared at it. “Oh my God! That is…oh my God!”

I had the feeling then that the project was going to be a success, that the tailoring business would be in good hands when I left, that inside all of these young women were countless untapped talents that just maybe stood a better chance now of finding expression.

I know life won’t always be easy for these women. Already, many have overcome more difficulty than most people in the Western world will know in their lifetime. But all I wish for them is what I began to see happening during their time at the vocational school: pride in their abilities and confidence in their way forward. And for some of them—to find hope again after losing it along the way.

Sustainable Living in Chagüitillo, by Paul Cook

Within walking distance of the center of Chagüitillo, Nicaragua, is a beautiful ravine with a trickling stream, a plethora of wildlife, and intriguing petroglyphs. Unfortunately, the ravine is also extremely contaminated. Both local residents and residents from a nearby town bath and launder their clothes in the natural wells formed by the stream. Cows from the local farms not only drink the contaminated water, but the subsequent feces they leave behind make the ravine un-usable. Because of the contamination, the Pre-Columbian museum is unable to lead tours through the ravine, not only limiting the museum’s financial resources, but also depriving any visitors from viewing the petroglyphs.

I worked closely with the Asociación para el Desarrollo de Chagüitillo (ADCH), or the Association for the Development of Chagüitillo, and with the Chagüitillo community to preserve the petroglyphs and the water from the stream by helping to construct a water trough at the entrance to the ravine which simultaneously prevents the cows from entering the ravine and provides them with clean water. A control box was also constructed to facilitate the distribution of water and allow for future expansion of the project. A local resident who provided generous support to the project, Natasha Robinson, described its impact on her: “I thought I could just pay for this project to be done. I thought I could be home right now drinking coffee, I didn’t think I would have to be out here working in the quebrada. But here I am working and loving it.”

When I arrived in Nicaragua and met my host family, I tried helping prepare dinner my first night there. After insisting for several minutes, they let me take plates to the table. That was it. The next night I asked again and they insisted that I sit down and start eating. I am not sure about other families, but all work and chores were dealt with in a similar manner. I would ask to help or say that they didn’t need to do something for me and they would insist and do it anyway. I never got used to people washing and ironing my clothes for me. Perhaps out of a great desire to make sure their guest was happy or they were genuinely full of kindness; whatever their motivation, my host family made certain they were doing all they could to make my stay with them comfortable.

Nonetheless, what I found surprising about my stay in Nicaragua was how quickly I became integrated into their daily culture. In just a few days I was living and working as most Nicaraguans in that rural part of the country did. Waking early, visiting farms, working on projects and returning for lunch with the family became the routine and life hardly varied from this. The afternoons were spent working on my second project and the evenings were filled with studying, watching novellas, or working with my host father on one of our many side projects. My thoughts and wishes quickly became intertwined with the dreams and wishes of my family. Most of my projects had an agriculture focus and so much of Nicaraguan agriculture depends on the fickle weather. I found myself waking with excitement each morning with the hope of overnight rain and a quite gloom when I realized we had gone another day without it. I began hoping for a black bean harvest full of primary class beans. In September, I remember hearing with great dismay that the rain is now actually ruining the crops because the black beans could not properly dry out. Talking with individuals from the area I learned the significance of growing seasons, the grave dependence on rain water, and the dire consequences of underemployment / unemployment.

I also worked with ADCH’s small organic farm. Growing fruits and vegetables to make and sell jellies and spreads, the farm of ADCH employs 10-25 people. The farm also supports the community through donating 15% of proceeds to the local preschool, supporting university studies, and promoting ecotourism. However, all of the crops withered and the community supporting activities ended when the neighboring farm supplying ADCH with irrigation water was sold and its new owners refused to continue selling its water. The farm’s manager wants to develop a model farm which will be used to demonstrate and educate the economic and environmental benefits of solar power, low-volume irrigation systems, and organic farming to other local producers. As a second project, I began investigating the resources and support needed to install a proper well, powered with solar panels, on the farm’s property. An efficient irrigation system for the farm was developed by the engineers at Durman Esquibel and the bureaucratic process to perforate the well has begun; the project still needs financial support before it can continue with the construction of its well and irrigation system though.

Vicente, the farm’s manager, thinks everything is possible if enough brain power is applied. He has a vision of a future Nicaragua that most would describe as implausible, but he convinced me over a few sessions of cigarettes and coffee that he could change the world if he had the support. Believing deeply in the power of communal cooperation, Vicente convincingly speaks of socialism in a personalized, but global way. With personal action on a micro level, he explains, we can change everything.

Toward the end of my internship, I reflect on my stay in Nicaragua. Working with so many wonderful people really was the most rewarding part of my experience in Nicaragua. As part of the organic farm project I traveled all over the country meeting people who had information on farming, wells, and solar panels. I visited rural communities where people had no city supplied running water, but used a solar powered pump to distribute drinking water. Grant work is still ongoing for our solar powered pump, but the farm lacks any funding for the equipment. Unfortunately, the recent flooding has just now diverted international aid away from any non-critical farming projects. The work in the ravine went well after a rough start. I organized several local soccer teams to help with the project and this provided great buy-in and support from the community. A water trough and watering system were built for the cows and plans to build a washing area are still in the works. The projects would not have been as successful without the great help from dozens of wonderful people. I am honored to have worked in such a truly great country.

“This City, it is Shining” by Shannon Harney

Shannon Harney recently returned from Jinja, Uganda. In Uganda, she worked with Soft Power Health, a local health clinic, to expand HIV education and testing in four rural secondary schools–via an educational HIV seminar for teachers, an on-campus HIV seminar for students that included free on-site voluntary testing and post-test counseling, and the creation of a savings account to generate funds for 2 Soft Power Health staff members to become HIV post-test counselor certified. The following is a selection of posts from the blog she kept in-country describing various stages of her experiences.

September 25, 2007
I live in an agrarian jungle; a banana plantation right outside our back door, coffee plant volunteers seeding everywhere, each home equipped with its own durable sweet potato field and as I look to the west to watch the sun set from the main road I look past an ocean of sugar cane.

My mother, Rose, is dark and strong, with speckled honeycomb eyes and hands the size and texture of a baseball mit. My older sister, Silvia, is small and waif-like, and yet incredible durable and grounded; she gets stuck in quick sand Christianity too often for me, but her intentions are good. And the last of our humble abode is Edith, she is 10 and has boyish facial features, from what I can tell she has 1 dress, 1 skirt and 1 shirt…all beyond repair. Her status in the family seems to be dangerously close to house servant and she is so soft spoken I’ve all but given up trying to hear her quiet obeys; I found out just this morning that her constant hacking cough is because she has malaria…there is a sever lack of communication in my house.

The 25 or so children that reside on my street alone are priceless. The day I moved in, I had an audience of about 10, just peering curiously into my window for hours…they didn’t want to chat or beg, they just wanted to see my things…things are a rare commodity out here.

October 12, 2007
Last week my supervisor wanted to demonstrate how our HIV test kits in the clinic work. He carelessly grabbed a blood sample from the dozens of test tubes perched on the counter and dropped a blot on a tiny receptor strip. Ten minutes later we went to check it out and it had read positive. The random lab sample, the older women in the hall who’d complained of dizziness was living unknowingly with HIV. We couldn’t inform her I was told, as its illegal to test for HIV without consent. So I sat and stared at the test for a few minutes until the doctor came and threw it in the rubbish bin. I bid the woman a safe journey and refilled my water bottle. Those are things I don’t know what to do with.

So. I’m here for 3 months (1 of which is gone with the wind). I’m not going to eliminate AIDS from rural Ugandan communities. But I’d like to think I could take a stab at educating, informing and testing my district, my community; with the hopes and idealistic longing that my efforts will propagate themselves elsewhere in the country. With the money I raised at home, the money that was donated so generously to this project by my dear friends, family and even distant acquaintances; I’ll be implementing a pilot project for Soft Power Health.

October 26, 2007
Monday night I facilitated my HIV education seminar for the secondary school teachers. I had assumed that we would start at about 7:30, after all, I’d told them to show up at 6:30, its called African Time. When I got to the hotel at 5:30 I’d set out to practice, set up, calm my nerves and my newly arrived bout of nausea…what do you know? All the teachers were there, sitting, waiting patiently. That blew my mind. I was really impressed, impressed by the honoring of their commitment to come, their timeliness, their motivation…it was really inspiring, it made me feel like perhaps I’d gotten this one right, perhaps I’d tapped into something that they really wanted, that they felt could help them make a difference. I’d asked the hotel to provide refreshments on my bill… you know, coffee, tea, sodas… so when I saw all the teachers kickin’ back with cold beers I knew the communication barrier had once again gotten the upper hand. I paid nearly three times more than I’d budgeted for, but the heated post-seminar roundtable discussion on teaching techniques was a lot more fiery thanks to the happy glowing buzz the teachers were feeling. Everything happens for a reason?

I spent that night throwing up (beers were not involved in this I assure you) and wasn’t able to go to work on Tuesday thanks to a number of GI issues. All I wanted was sleep, the temperature in my solar oven house to drop below 90 and my host-mom to please stop offering me fried macaroni… and then down the path to my house comes trotting a whole band of cohorts. My clinic was worried about ‘the sickness’ and so they all decided to abandon their health profession posts for the afternoon and come visit me; needless to say it was the first sick-in-bed day I’ve ever spent surrounded by a doctor, two nurses, a lab tech and a cook…just in case.

November 22, 2007
The logistical swamp bucket that presents itself when trying to coordinate three autonomous bodies is thick and it is fierce. After much pleading, rationalizing and exhausted compromises each school finally confirmed a date [for a school seminar and testing] that worked for both Soft Power Health (i.e. me…that wasn’t too difficult) and AIDS Information Centre Jinja.

East Secondary School- November 5th at 10:30 am
The AIC staff arrived one hour late to our meeting place, thus we arrived nearly 2 hours late to our appointment. It didn’t seem to be any skin off the Headmaster’s back as he was lounging under a mango tree eating jackfruit when I arrived in my long-skirted American “I heart efficiency” guise. We lumbered into a concrete classroom with dirt floors and twiddled fingers as the students scuffled in. The presentation went nicely, my favorite moment was when a cocky 18 year old raised his hand to say, “You said that condoms they should be thrown in the pit latrine. But me, I fuck in the bush, so what then?” The AIC HIV counselor was kind enough to take that question for me; I cowered backwards and resisted the urge to kick him in the mouth. We tested 70 students.

Lubani Secondary School- November 8th at 1pm
The AIC staff arrived one hour late to our meeting place, thus we arrived nearly 2 hours late to our appointment. It didn’t seem to be any skin off the teacher’s backs as they were lounging under a grove of pine trees, “We have just released the students for lunch. You wait for some 40 minutes.” So we began the presentation at around 4 pm, at which time I was introduced by one of the younger teachers as his wife. This set the students into such a fit it took canes and cursing of all sorts to quell them. This particular teacher, my husband, has taken to text messaging me late at night to tell me he misses me, that he needs my personality or to ask me “ware you b?” I gave the presentation to just under one thousand students. Outside. Without a microphone. These are times when I thank my theatre career… projection, annunciation…pause, punch and attitude…you got it! We tested 97 students before we ran out of vacutainer needles and the sun went down. This was the most chaotic group of all the students, I sustained several minor injuries that evening as well as coming to the conclusion that I don’t ever, ever want to be a schoolteacher. The electricity at the campus was shifty at best and we realized about thirty minutes before dark that the special hire car we were riding in had no headlights. Henry, the driver, and I had a friendly little chat where all I could think about was that he had a huge problem of misusing the word “generally”, ‘Well, generally, I have no lights. Oh, yes, generally I will go get another car.” This was not the end of the “Henry screwing me up” saga.

Trinity College- November 12th 1pm
By this point I’d like to think I’d worked out most of the hitches. I told the AIC people to arrive four hours before the program began and this time we were only about 20 minutes late. I educated the students in a really beautiful shaded arbor; pine trees, eucalyptus and palm all collected in a strange kind of partnership to provide a cool and calm space in which to talk about viral infections and condoms. We were able to test 100 children and make it home before dark. I felt good, I felt really proud driving home around dusk, the pink sky burning into the sugar cane plantations, the amueze rising as a fingernail in the sky.

St. Stephen’s Secondary School- November 14th 10:30 am
I almost don’t want to talk about it. But this, as much any of the pitfalls and obstacles, was part of my experience, part of the reality of getting things done or not so done here. I received a text message from the HM from St. Stephens at about 10 am the day of the program, something along the lines of, “Please cancel your visit. We are too busy. Thank you.” Keeping in mind please, that this is after two months of planning, of confirming and reconfirming of sticking to a date and time that he suggested. And so I kindly asked him to reconsider based on the fact that the program had already been paid for, the counselors had been hired etc etc. His response was, “Our position is final and unchangeable. Your program is not as important as our students learning. Thank you.” The story concludes with me rolling up to the school in a heated fury and laying in on the administrative staff, using my big English words and all.
Over, done with, unfortunate. Thus the lackluster aspect of this whole sha-bang.

But now I have about a month to learn this place. Learn the ebbs and flows of her land and people, the things I’ve been biking past too fast to notice. The weather has been peach, plum, pear perfect lately; cloudy sunshine days, breezy, beautiful. The living here is easy and I’m gonna take an HIV load off and enjoy it while I can. Christmas is coming in fast this year.

Lessons in English, by Madeline Gressel

I came to Udaipur, India with FSD to work as a teacher in a small school for poor children, called the Talent Academy. I was told that I would be working with the school’s English teacher, helping supplement conversational English lessons. I have previously worked teaching art to elementary school students in the U.S., so I thought I could teach some art classes as well.

When I started at the Talent Academy, my supervisor told me that the English teacher was on vacation and would be back in few days, so I began teaching on my own. I worked with about 120 students daily, in sections of ten students at a time. In the mornings I worked with the seven year olds, and in the afternoon I worked with eleven year olds. For my first lesson, I had planned to have my students draw their favorite animals. I thought this was a good lead-in to learning the names of animals in English. I had assumed that, since the students took English class, they would know enough English for us to communicate, but they didn’t speak any. It was incredibly frustrating to realize that I was unable to communicate the simplest of ideas, like “favorite animal” or “draw this” or “sit down and be quiet.” By the time the fifth graders arrived, I was tired enough to let them play “English” hangman for the whole afternoon. Everyday since the first, they have begged me to play hangman again.

The English teacher never came back from vacation. I had no idea how to teach English, especially considering how little Hindi I knew at that time. When I asked people for help, I got the same explanation again and again of “lesson plans.” There seemed to be a pervasive conception that if I planned my lessons the night before, my students would understand it. I was given the English course reader to study, a grammatically incorrect English book that taught sentences such as: “He is a simple boy,” “This is a red color,” and “He is a playing cricket.”

I decided to focus on the art lessons, since I’ve been told art is a universal language. The biggest challenge with the art classes was convincing the kids to draw from imagination. Previously, they had been taught to copy from a book. Whenever I asked them to draw something, they asked me to draw it on the black board first (“madam, banaona!”). Then they would copy it line for line. So I had them draw themselves, their families, their homes—things that held personal, individual, and specific meaning. It was exciting to watch them experiment, and to watch them find their own style. For the first time, their drawings emerged completely differently from their neighbors’. When I was younger, I watched the Sound of Music and wondered how it was possible for a whole family of children to simply not know how to sing. Teaching my art classes, I felt like we were truly starting from the very beginning, and I was Maria von Trapp Meets India.

At one point, I brought in some American children’s books that my mother sent me from home. When I showed them to my students, I realized that the books were a complete novelty to them. I also realized, though perhaps I should have noticed before, that my students had no free access to story books.

When I was a child, I didn’t enjoy school, and I spent most of my time reading. Part of the reason I loved to read was that, in those moments, I got a chance to be elsewhere, to escape the things in my life that made me unhappy. When I showed the books to my students, I spent a lot of time explaining the pictures—a merry-go-round, a circus, an ice-skating rink—things that I took for granted in my own childhood. In a lot of ways, my students have a more difficult childhood than I had, and it upset me that they didn’t have the opportunity to escape the realities of their own lives the way a child can only find in a book. I decided to apply for a grant to open a library at the school.

Sometimes while I’m teaching, I try to remember my own student teachers, and I barely can. When I began teaching, I thought it would be a miracle if I could remember everyone’s name. Now I can’t imagine forgetting them. It’s strange to think that I’ll only be a vague memory to them soon. I asked my mother to send me some of my favorite books from childhood for the library. Those books were so important to me as a child that leaving them here feels like leaving a part of me. I doubt that my students will think of me when they read the books, but they might think like me, get excited about the things that excited me, love the things I loved, go the places I went. I think that opening the door to reading, which is in some senses opening all doors, is the most important thing I can give them.

_{All photos by Inga Peterson.}