“Back to the Grinding Wheel…-Work”

The holidays are over unless you are catholic (there are a ton of Catholic holidays and the catholic sisters I work with are always telling me about another holiday they have coming up which means food, drinks, and hangout out with people…oh yeah, of course there is prayer and remembrance for that special celebration).  Might I add that that comment has absolutely nothing to do with this blog, I am just astonished at just how many holidays there are that are celebrated in the Catholic Church!  I am so happy that I live in Burkina Faso where people of all religions can hang out and celebrate together, it is like the ultimate cultural and religious exchange.  But back to the real topic…WORK!

So the holidays are over and it has been the time to get back into the grind of things.  I cannot remember how much I have told you all about my work here, but I will try to summarize.  I work at a community house and help plan life skills sorts of activities for the girls.  For example in the month of November the topic of the month was Hygiene and health, December was all about communication strategies and being assertive and confident.  This month is about decision making and goal setting.  I also have English clubs with the girls because they take English as a foreign language.  Finally, I am helping to documents the progress of the community house, since it is a pilot program we have to look at whether or not girls living in the community house are measuring up to their peers.  So for the last week I have been making more tables and charts and comparing data based on more data than thought I ever would.  I must say I may have been spoiled by the wonderful technology HCPS purchased to analyze data because right now creating my own excel worksheets to do such is well uh...some work, but its cool.  I enjoy helping out :-).  The community house just got a computer so hopefully in the next few months I can try to transfer some of this knowledge over to the administration here so they can have the joy of making excel sheets, or at least maintaining the ones already created.

For the last few months of my stay here I have decided to try to up the ante and work in the town a bit more.  I now have an English club with some administration of the jail, which is quite interesting to say the least.  Some of them are working toward professional goals that will take them to English speaking countries so they are trying to improve their conversational English.  There is a huge AIDS Day celebration that I am helping with (yes we are 2 months late, but it’s going to be huge…blog coming soon), and I am also trying to set up some peer educator trainings in the nearby high schools.  There are other things in the making, but I would rather wait until things pan out a little more before sharing.  To say the least, things are going well and I honestly feel like my work here is going well.  The thing I love most is that the ideas and the resources for these activities are here already and I am just another support.  My hope is that my work is sustainable development, not “here comes the American plopping some info in our laps that we didn’t ask for”.   I am truly trying to work with the human resources here and well, things seem to be working.  Wish me well as I continue to explore and work.