Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Minty Victory is Mine!


I want to take a chance to thank my Mother Colleen, her husband Larry, and my Uncle John! They are helping me to realize one of my PC visions. They have come together to fund my Toothbrushing Club! Soon I will have an army of little toothbrushing maniacs all foamy-mouthed and cavity-free every morning. I'm sure there will be many photos and even videos! I will post updates you can be sure.

Support your Volunteers

Several months ago there was a lot of talk about cuts in Peace Corps funding in American news media. You may have seen something in your local paper or on the television. These budget cut backs are currently being implemented all over the world. The African Region has decided to cut volunteer numbers rather than the support staff. While it in unfortunate that ten less communities in Benin will receive a volunteer, I am glad that this approach was taken. Unfortunately, we are still experiencing some financial difficulties here and they could become worse over the next few years.

I remain hopeful that this could change in the coming years. Both McCain and Obama both mentioned increasing the Peace Corps budget while on the campaign trail, so it would seem bipartisan support for PC is a no-brainer. I would also support stategic and structural changes, but I'm not going to lay out my 7 point plan here. I will say that I would increase the readjustment allowance for RPCVs (now it is at 6k USD, not enough to "start over" in a major American city).

I am posting to take the opportunity to pass along this link I came across that guide people through the process of contacting your representative to ask them to support the PC program. Please pass the word along, we are doing our best out here, and it would be a shame if cutbacks became too extensive and whole programs were lost.

Moringa Madness

We've hit a couple more hurdles, but are still moving forward. We ran into a snag when we were asked for a copy of the title for the land my NGO partner, SADEC is donating to the project. This is a problem when, like most of the developing world, rural property titles don't exist. There is no way to prove legally who owns what; this can be a problem even in urban areas. We managed to negotiate a solution whereby the king of my village and the Chef d'Arrondissment will sign a typed up document verifying the ownership of the property.

Due to setbacks we have reworked our schedule and modified our plan quite a bit. Though I think that our new solutions will actually put us in a stronger position at the end of the day. Asside from that we have worked together to solve the problems which has improved the problem solving abilities of our team. This is something that will make it easier when it is time to walk away next September.

Come January we should be ready to roll out our marketing campaign/ informative workshops at the local health centers and open our product into the marketplace. Before this can happen there is still much to do: we have to contact our local sales reps (Marché Mamas) and train them. We also need to collect preliminary data from the health centers we will be working with so we can acurately analyze the impact of our work.

Monday, November 3, 2008

Little by Little

School has been back in for a couple of weeks and things are running about as smoothly as can be expected (which is to say not at all). No matter, I've been teaching my lessons and doing my best to get the students back into the school mentality. So far so good.

With my grant project I hit a pretty major snag. I'm happy to say my partners and I sat down and came up with a work-around. Having surmounted a major challenge makes me confident
our team can really make this thing work.

Other than that, I've been up in Parakou (a northern city) for a couple of days now. We had our regional Volunteer meeting. We also used the time to kill, butcher, and grill a sheep. It was delicious and a lot of fun.

Elections are coming up soon. I had planned to watch them with some other volunteers, but I don't want to spend all of that time out of village. I'll probably make my way with a friend or two up to Glazoue Wednesday, grab a beer, and watch some satellite TV.

Not much more to report. I'm alive and doing fine. Going to be out of contact for a while, I think.