JULY (a few successes)

oh goodness, i don't know if i'm ready for this. ok, here's what happened in july:

i went to the city of Chimoio for a weekend for the JOMA transfer meeting. JOMA is the youth organization, run by peace corps volunteers, whose conference i went to in april with some of the youths i work with. this meeting was for outgoing PCVs who ran the conferences last year to impart their wisdom to this my group of PCVs. the prospect of being handed this huge project was more than a little overwhelming, but it all went ok. there were about 10 of us "newbies" there who had participated in the 3 siumltaneous conferences (northern, central and southern regions). we chose new positions/jobs (i'm going to be working on improving the content of the curriculum, especially the gender aspects), and talked about some changes to the conference and program structure. JOMA is still a relatively young program and every year the new group of volunteers has made some significant changes. for instance, it started out as a boys only program (the point being that there are lots of groups working to empower women, but unless you get the guys on board it's going to be difficult if not impossible to achieve real widespread change), about 2 years ago they decided to let girls be invovled in the school clubs, and this year was the first year they allowed girls to come to the conferences. it has also varied year to year the number of conferences, locations, and timing. but the main changes we talked about, in addition to vastly improving the curriculum, were downscaling the conferences a bit. they're a lot of fun for the kids, but they're a lot of work, and older volunteers have attested that the vast majority of their time, energy and budget went into a 5 day conference, meaning that activities for the rest of the school year weren't well supported or organized. we decided to have smaller, more local, more frequent conferences, and have separate ones for gender/sexuality and communications areas (theater, journalism, etc). the smaller conferences mean more kids will be able to participate (i could only bring 4 from a group of almost 20) and they'll be easier for volunteers to plan because they'll be more local (a lot of on the ground planning for the past conferences has fallen on whoever happens to live in or nearest the city it's held in, whether or not they were the person best suited or most interested). there were a lot of LONG discussions because of course everyone has had different experiences at the conferences and in their groups, but by the end i felt ok about the decisions we made. still a little freaked out about the huge responsibilities of the new undertaking, but i figure if the last groups managed it, we can!

about a week after i got back from the JOMA meeting, alison and i ran a couple of trainings for our peer educators, both supported by icap. the first was a 2-day permaculture training. i did most of the planning, using the information from the training i'd participated in, and planned a similar training, with the mornings doing theoretical work talking about the ideas and the advantages of permaculture, and in the afternoons putting the ideas into practice. i was a little stressed out going into it, but it went really well. instead of me giving the training, it was mostly run by the peer educator who i'd brought to nampula and another mozambican who had participated in the peace corps training. this was a huge advantage, not only for my stress level, but because they are much more fluent in portuguese farm-language than i am, they both speak the local language fluently, and i think that pretty much any information is received better when it's being given by a peer and not an outsider. so these two guys ran the training, i tried to keep them on track with the program and jumped in when i had a point i thought was important to emphasize or whatever, and alison helped with the logistics, things like making sure the food showed up on time and we had copies of the documents we needed, etc. the land we dug up was a short walk from the classroom site, in the backyard of one of the icap doctors. unfortunately the doctor left recently so no one will be there to see if our garden is growing, which is a shame because it came out beautifully! it was sometimes a bit chaotic having 20 people digging, weeding, seeding, whatever at the same time, but they all seemed really excited about the new techniques. i was actually pretty surprised, because they all have machambas (gardens or small farms) so i figured they would know a lot about gardening, but it seemed like a lot of people just do what they see other people doing and had never really talked about techniques, or the reasons why their gardens did or didn't produce well. so not only did it go well logistically, but i actually felt like people got even more out of it than i had originally thought they might. only time will tell how many of them will actually use and benefit from the techniques (unfortunately it was alreay in the middle of a growing season so most things people couldn't start right away even if they wanted to), but the materials i prepared (power points, handouts, schedule, etc) can be used by other volunteers, one group of peer educators has asked to start a garden at their hospital, and another icap volunteer in a neighboring district has asked alison and me to do a training for his peer educators, so this was definitely an overall positive experience.

the other training alison and i ran was on project design and management (PDM), or how to come up with a strong project idea and write a grant proposal to be able to realize it. this one alison did most of the planning and i just helped with logistics and stuff, but it also went well. we invited peer educators who are also part of other legalized organizations, because in order to apply for most grants you have to be part of a legalized organization. the process can be really hard conceptually, because you have to evaluate ideas on multiple levels, not just what's the most exciting or interesting, and because there are a lot of detailed steps to the process, which are really important in terms of securing funds, but can seem kind of silly otherwise. but they got through that training as well, going through all the steps in a big group to design a fictitious project, and some of the peer educators who participated recently asked me if we could work together to prepare a proposal for a similar project for real, so i mark that another success.

my last big event for the month was another training in nampula put on by peace corps. the topic this time was behavior change communication, or BCC. the theory is that many programs seek to solve problems by giving people information, but when the solution to the problem requires some major changes in people's behavior, this isn't always enough. there are myriad cases here of people who can talk the talk, they can answer questions all day long about how to prevent HIV transmission, how to use a condom, why to use a condom, how to take their medication, etc. but then go home and do all the "wrong" things. obviously having correct information is hugely important, but information education communication (IEC) alone doesn't solve problems. so the hope is that BCC will. the conference, while put on by peace corps, was led by people from an organization called global health communication (GHC). over the week they taught us 2 techniques. the first was a game called pathways to change, which looks a lot like chutes and ladders. you would play the game with a group, and you start out with a specific case or question. it can be imaginary (jose is 15 years old and having unprotected sex and....) or real (our group wants to achieve x). and as you move along the paths you land on either facilitators or barriers to the goal, which can be personal, societal, or environmental. the goal is to look at the big picture, to help people understand all the factors that influence their situation, both positively and negatively, so that the ultimate outcome is more logical than just reactionary to certain factors. it was an interesting exercise, and took shockingly long for a board game. my favorite element of it was that you present people with a problem (be it real or imaginary, at least applicable to their life) but then instead of telling them how to solve it, you open up a discussion around it. the goal can still be to solve the problem, but i think most people probably react negatively to just being told what to do and not being told why, especially if it's coming from an outsider or someone they feel doesn't understand their situation, and the purpose of this game was to create a situation in which people could come up with their own solutions which are within their own frame of reference. i haven't yet tried the game with any of my groups, although i have explained the concept to some peer educators. my idea was that they could sometimes use a variation of it, instead of their morning palestras (talks) at the hospitals they could just present a situation and start a discussion. the second technique that we learned was a process for sitting down with a group, talking about a problem or a goal, brainstorming factors that influence that problem, dually prioritizing those factors in terms of importance and feasability of change, then coming up with a final proiority and designing a project that reflects that. i think it's a very valid process, but one that closely resembles several things we've learned in peace corps (among them the PDM curriculum alison and i used in our recent training), so i found this aspect of the conference a little less useful and captivating. but overall, i definitely agree with the idea that people need to be allowed to evaluate their own circumstances and come up with their own ideas for how to do things. and there were many representatives from icap at the conference, 4 volunteers, 3 peer educators, a psychiatrist and a pscychologist, so we had a really interesting array of opinions and ideas on how to use the new techniques. we haven't yet had the chance to sit down and discuss ways we might want to implement them formally, but i think many of us are already using the ideas informally.

ok, that's that month. i realize that another month is just about over that i haven't even touched on, but these posts are so long, they tire me out, they probably tire you out as well. i'm going to put up some links with JOMA info. and i've put up some more pictures at a new site, that i'll add the link to. my computer died recently, and i'm daily realizing things that were on there that i've lost - most importantly some work documents and MANY of my pictures (tho not all) so even tho it's going to take 1000 years, i'm going to start trying to upload all of my pictures instead of a select few so they'll be more secure. i hope everyone reading this (are there any of you out there anymore, or did you get tired of waiting?) is doing well. i'm doing fine, although getting a little burnt out, but i'm taking some vacation next month which should help cure that! i'll try to update about my august before i leave. beijos:)