formações

that's portuguese for trainings, and it's the reason i haven't posted in so long, trainings galore! i warned of some of them in my last post, oh so long ago, but more have appeared to occupy my time since then.

in mid-April i went back to nampula for a week for the JOMA (youth for change and action) conference. i brought 4 members of AJOCS, the youth theater group i've been working with that includes several peer educators, 3 as students and one as a counterpart. the JOMA conference was a lot of fun - it felt a little like summer camp. we were at a "hotel" a little outside the city, with extensive grounds, and lots of separate buildings like cabins (really, like summer camp). there were 16 groups from 16 high schools (well, minus my group which isn't school-based) from Zambezia, Nampula, and Cabo Delgado provinces, doing activities in theater, journalism, photography, and community art (murals). every day in the morning there were gender sessions for the boys (which i unfortunately can't comment on because i wasn't allowed to attend, boo!) while the professors and the pcvs went to sessions on leadership. in the afternoon were tech sessions in the four areas i mentioned above. in the evenings there were group activities - they split the boys into two groups, the pirates and ninjas, and every evening there was a different competition. they got really into it, and it was crazy and fun. did i mention it was like summer camp? i really had no idea what to expect from the JOMA conference, but i was very pleasantly surprised. it was very well organized (all pcv planned and run, so all the more impressive), and my kids (as i refer to them, tho i really shouldn't, 3 are 19 and one's 23!) were awesome. i was the envy of all the other pcvs, because my guys were all really well behaved, super enthusiastic, good participants, just awesome. and all 4 of them were involved in the final production. all the different tech groups worked towards a final project, and the theater group chose a theme (oppression of women), planned out a story, made all the props, and practiced all week, and they did a fabulous job. it was definitely a feel-good, feel-productive week.

i didn't come home after nampula, but went straight to milange (after 6 hours broken down by the side of the road and an overnight stop with some other pcvs). in milange i and 3 other fellow icap pcvs helped our bosses to train a new group of peer educators to work in the local health center and community. this training was more tiring to me. although i did less running around and had less responsibility, it was more mentally taxing to have to work to explain difficult concepts (HIV, volunteerism) to a group of people with a wide range of experiences, education levels, and languages (there were 3 being spoken!). but it was also really great to finally see how a peer educator training was run. there is a set curriculum that icap uses, but of course things change, people have questions on things the trainers think are simple, and we were always getting off schedule, so every night, after spending the whole day on our feet explaining things we'd go back to the hotel to re-hash the current day and plan the next, eat dinner, and then pass out. most days the pcvs just helped make sure people were understanding directions in group work, helped pass out materials, serve food, etc. but one day we ran the session on prevention, ie: we taught a group of 50 people to properly put condoms on bananas. it was pretty hilarious, and it went well.

after the long week in milange we got a little bit of a reward, we pcvs stayed an extra day and crossed the border into malawi! we just did a little day-trip to blantyre (about a 2 hour ride). it was a really interesting experience to compare malawi, however briefly and superficially, with mozambique. while some things seemed identical (same stuff being sold by the side of the road, same-looking women in brightly-patterned capulanas carrying things on their heads, same tiny houses, same gorgeous mountains), in many ways malawi is like a whole different world. not only do people speak english (in addition to the local language), but the second you cross the border the roads are wide, well-paved, and pothole-free, buildings look less dilapidated and there's less trash, and the chapas were comfortable and NOT overcrowded! it was surreal. we just went to blantyre, had "city food" (chai tea, ice cream, burritos, yogurt), and wandered around. we discovered, to our disappointment, that capulanas are more expensive there, so we didn't get any. and we discovered a nice craft market where for the first time in my life i haggled for earrings in english...so weird. and then we came home. it was a good day. which was followed by an awful day, after waking up at 3am to catch a chapa back, the road from milange is AWFULLY bumpy and dusty, our chapa was in terrible condition and very crowded, and when we finally got to our next stop and got out we discovered we were COVERED in fine red road dust. we looked like hell.

so after that i made it home, finally, and took a few weeks to re-settle into work and whatnot. then the second week of may i went back to nampula for another training, this one in permaculture (permanent agriculture). peace corps put it on for interested volunteers, and we all got to bring counterparts, so i brought one of my peer educators. it was only two days, but it was a really good training. the first day the trainer (an ex-pcv who now works for peace corps in tanzania) talked a little bit about the main concepts of permaculture and why it makes sense in so many ways for people here. in essence, the idea is that if you "double dig" (dig twice as deep as people usually do) then roots can go down instead of out to the sides and you can plan a lot more food in the same amount of space, and if you build good ditches and burms (dirt walls) to control the water flow, in times of little rain the ditches hold water in, and in times of too much they funnel it off so the garden doesn't get washed away. those things combined with good fertilization and management can lead to an up to 400% increase in production, which means you need to farm a lot less land to feed your family, or if you farm the same amount of land you can have a lot more production and have extra to sell, and you'll be more inclined to vary your crop (instead of planing all corn and rice cuz those are the staple foods and you can't afford to not have them) and have a healthier diet. anyway, after talking about that stuff for a little bit, we went on a little "nature walk" around the grounds of the hotel (same summer-camp place where JOMA was) to see things that were well or poorly planted, and things that grow wild that are really healthy. then, over the next day and a half, we built a garden. we cleared an area (i'm horrible at estimating areas/distances, but roughly around 15x30 feet), built a compost pile (way more complex than i'd originally thought), designed the layout for ditches, berms, and beds, and started digging. that was the first day. the second day we "double dug" to almost a meter deep (hard work!), fertilized with charcoal, ash, and manure, and planted corn, beans, pumpkins, lemon grass, and papaya trees, and learned a cool way to water tomato plants underground. and i'm going to stop writing about this cuz it's probably boring, anyone who is into gardens can ask me more about it. i'm not sure i ever knew i was into gardens, but i had a lot of fun, and i felt like it was a really worthwhile training, and my peer educator loved it and now we're talking about how to transmit the information to the other peer educators here in quelimane. and i'm trying to figure out how dig up any land in my teeny tiny courtyard to try it out for myself. and i discovered that there's lemongrass growing in my courtyard already so i can have yummy tea all the time!

SO, that was permaculture. if you think i'm done talking about trainings, you're wrong! a while back i mentioned that alison and i had been working on revising a slide presentation on HIV to use during the peer educator trainings? well we used it during the milange training, and it went well, which was pretty exciting. but the other slide presentations from the trainings, the existing curriculum, were pretty dry, sometimes hard to understand, and not very aesthetically pleasing. so we took it upon ourselves to make them better, which turned into a LONG process. so i've spent the past few weeks working on that, in addition to trying to get back into the swing of my peer educator activities, again. then at the end of last week we found out that, before icap ran the training for new peer educators in quelimane, they were going to run a training of trainers (TOT in the lingo) to train mozambican health workers and peer educators to train other peer educators in the future. an awesome idea, but not a lot of warning. some icap big-wigs are up from maputo to help run the training, and they want to give the newly formed trainers a complete manual and cd with the slides on it at the end, so alison and i have been working overtime this week to get them done, including a lot of sessions of people critiquing our work. it's not done meanly, and it's hard to argue with health professionals and mozambicans if they tell you it's better to do something a different way, but it can still be frustrating after putting so much effort in. but it's also really awesome to think that these things that we've been working on will go on to be used by others. so this training is probably going to go through saturday, then next week we're having the training of my new peer educators which i'm definitely excited about. i think some of the newly trained trainers might help run it, and all of my groups have seemed a little run down and tired lately, so hopefully the reinforcements will do us all a lot of good.

whew! and that's basically my life. the rain has pretty much stopped, the mud and puddles are gone, the nights are so cool i can sleep in pajama pants and sometimes a hoodie. i'm pretty happy there. and despite being happy about the training, i'll be glad when it's over and i can get back to other work - observing peer educator activities, trying to convince them to show up for meetings, doing gender and theater activities with my JOMA, working on writing a grant to help them do some activities, and planning a mini-permaculture training for my peer educators. that will take up my month of june at least, and i know i have some other activities planned for the months after that. it's crazy how time's flying! i constantly go back and forth between feeling super productive and like i'm doing nothing, between feeling like i have tons of time and no time left. and between being busy and then soaking up what little down time i have, i've become completely negligent with regards to email and snail mail, and for this i apologize. it doesn't mean i don't love you, i swear. hope everyone on the other end of this blog is doing well! oh! and your prize for having read this ridiculously long entry is some new picture on the picasa site! enjoy! :)