Days to go...

Six months already! My time here in St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) is almost up. I leave to South Africa in 1 week! I can’t believe it! I’m gonna miss this place really. I know I keep saying it, but I really have met lots of lovely people in this country as well as the volunteers I have been studying with. I know I also keep going on about the beauty of this country, but really, you gotta see it for yourself to believe it. Everyday I still can’t believe I’m here and I’m sure most of you are still trying to find it on the map! Not many people, who are not familiar with the Caribbean, know SVG or where it is. So it’s really nice that it is mostly ‘untouched’– there are not that many tourists, which is great for the nature but not so for the economy. That might change though with this new international airport they are building which should be completed in 2011.
So what I have been doing this last month is finalizing the fundraising and preparing for the project work. We reached the fundraising target finally! The raffle was really a success and really helped us to reach our fundraising goals. We had the draw this past Saturday and despite the rain and a small audience, we did it! It’s rainy season now by the way, but I am not complaining because it’s really hot and humid throughout :) And yes we could have considered that when we were planning the date, but we really needed lots of time to organize so we couldn’t have had it earlier. Anyway we have a great experience now and can give tips to the next team or in our projects. Not sure what kind of raffle you could hold in a village in rural Africa ;) but anyway it’s about the whole experience of carrying out a fundraiser event – planning, organizing, mobilizing, etc.
This event was also a great way to connect to lots of different people and to get to know more about the people and the country as well as to inform people about our program and cause and about the situation in the places we are going to in Africa and why we are going there, as well as to share our personal backgrounds. For many, it’s the first time to personally meet people from so many different “distant” countries and it’s been great to share info – describing our home countries and cultures and learning more about this country and culture. Vincy’s are particularly proud of their food – as I mentioned earlier in an update, we are often offered all kinds of foods, especially fruits, wherever we go. The fruits are the best as there are all sorts of fruit trees everywhere and if it’s in season, the fruits are overflowing and people just pop into their backyard and grab a handful for you – coconut, mango, wax apple, sugar apple, soursop, breadfruit, plums, cherries, oranges, tangarines, etc… I love them all, but I must say the soursop is very special and unique to this region.
OK, so you get the point that I will miss this place. I even got used to the squished, loud soca music mini bus rides! And now I’m off to South Africa. For many of my team members it will be their first time to travel to the continent itself and it’s strange that I’m also feeling such an excitement as if I’ve also never been there. Maybe it’s because of a combination of a few things like it will be my first time to South Africa and it’s been a while since I was last in “Africa” and I’m going for a different reason than usual – a challenging reason! But again I will try to keep you informed as best as I can, although I already know I will have less access to internet so…not that I will be forgetting y’all. As I mentioned earlier, I will be participating in an HIV&AIDS awareness and prevention program (TCE – Total Control of the Epidemic). It’s an effective program that runs in many of the southern African countries including South Africa, Mozambique, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia and others. I will try and explain a bit more about it as I get into the program, but if you are already interested to read more about it, you can check it out here.
For now I’d like to thank all who have supported me during my time here in SVG. I’d like to especially thank the Vincy’s who have been so kind and generous, even befriending a “crazy” volunteer like me ;) I know you are still wondering why I would come half way round the world to give my time and work for free in this tiny country and then go off to another far away place to continue to give my time and work for free in remote areas not many people would be willing travel to…
Well, hope to keep in touch with everyone so that it may become clearer why I’m doing what I’m doing.
Ciao everyone!
BIG HUG!

Carnival come and gone….

Yey! I’ve experienced a Caribbean carnival! Was great to see: Lots of energy and music and dance and colour! Of course we took the opportunity to fundraise because there were lots of people in Kingstown during those days and lots of visitors, mostly relatives, coming over for the event. There was a lot of excitement a while before the event as it was hyped up in the media and everywhere. The carnival soca songs were playing on the radio for a while already. There were lots of different events around the country, not only in the city.

Events include the “jump-up’s”, where trucks with huge speakers parade with music blasting as loud as possible and people dancing through the streets (in costume or not), the “J’Ouvert”, where there’s dancing through the streets and throwing of paints and water so that everyone is covered in colours, and of course the beauty contests. I did not get to see the jouvert (or jouve/juuvay…) because it takes place in the very early morning (like 3am) until after sunrise, but I saw the costume parades and other parades which were during the day.





It was a bit difficult to fundraise during the peak time though as it was crowded and loud (a good loud of energizing soca music!). We were mostly selling raffle tickets – I mentioned before that we were arranging a raffle, well we finally did it and have printed out loads of tickets to sell and try to fundraise in that way. We had to invest in the first prize (a laptop we got on discount) but the rest of the prizes were donated to us by very generous businesses, including a round-trip to one of the islands in the grenadines. The sales are going good, but it stills takes a long time to get around to cover as many areas as possible, but it’s fun to do and to give people a chance to get something in return for their donation, although a few people still prefer to donate the usual way rather than participating in the raffle because of religious reasons, which we respect of course and we still welcome the usual donations.



It’s been a really good experience to arrange this raffle. Simona and I were busy for a while getting the donations for the prizes, then it was a matter of setting the price of the ticket, designing and printing the tickets. Then the whole team has been busy selling them and we just have to coordinate the areas we’re selling. It’s the last fundraising activity we’re doing and we should be done in about a week. Then we will finish off our specialization tasks and prepare to depart in the next month.
Hopefully I will have good news for you the next time I write – finally reaching the fundraising target! Can’t wait…then I can stop bothering you guys about donations (although they are always welcome of course as I will still be volunteering for the next 9 months!). I hope I will continue to have such super local support - over here it has been just super! Everyone is so supportive, businesses as well as individuals. Like the other day we were invited on a radio program to help promote our school and the volunteer program – Simona and I were on the radio! And we met the host just the beginning of last week. That’s how nice people are here. It’s a small independent radio station and we had about 10 minutes on air but that’s good enough for us. A few of us have also been on the public radio station, on television and in one of the newspapers. It’s great and it works coz it’s a small place and word gets around quickly ;)
Take care all and ’till next time…

Waiting for Carnival!

Hi all. This time I will probably be able to update you only once this month. This month started off with a building weekend, which means we fix up the buildings and facilities in the school and cleaning up the grounds. During normal schedules we carry out minor maintenance tasks once a week during the time set aside for ‘action on compound’, such as clearing the gutters and cleaning the kitchen thoroughly. During the building weekends we dedicate a whole weekend to carry out more time consuming maintenance work on the school buildings and grounds such as paint work, fixing roofs, mowing and clearing up shrubs (we have a huge compound and everything grows really fast, especially in the rainy season which is starting now).
We have had various courses over the past weeks, the most interesting one for me being on tropical diseases. It was not only important to learn more about common diseases such as Malaria, Tuberculosis (TB) and Typhoid, but also most importantly to learn how to teach about these diseases to “village Africa”. It’s not as easy as one thinks when you have to try to explain something differently. I chose to study TB more closely because of the relation with HIV (it is reported that TB is the leading cause of death among HIV infected people). I’m grateful that there are vaccines for many common diseases and even more grateful that I can afford these vaccinations :) The problem, as you all know, is that most people don’t have proper nutrition, medication or care for easily preventable or curable diseases or conditions such as diarrhea. But I hope to be able to help improve these conditions as long as it takes me!
Anyway, I’m sure you will hear more of that from me later on. For now, it’s about doing what I can do here. I hope I will leave a ‘footprint’ as an individual…As a group we are supposed to leave something tangible (practical or not) as a footprint at the school. So keep an eye on my blog to see what we decide to leave behind.
We are also starting with our specialization period, which means we carry out certain tasks more specific to our projects, in my case TCE project in South Africa. As I mentioned before I am involved in the mini TCE community work here, which I can just continue with for my specialization period. In addition we all have to prepare and give complete classes (earlier we only worked on presentations). So most of my classes will be related to HIV and AIDS, but we also have to learn to give general classes such as geography or science classes for various audiences from primary school to adults in the training colleges. We also have to start thinking more concretely about our plan in the project we go to and any ideas we have on various fundraising and community activities. Six months is not so long so we have to plan well for the whole period.
OK, I’ll stop boring you…I’ll leave you with more interesting news – the Vincy Mas (Carnival) is coming up next week! It’s such a hype and there have already been lots of activities and shows in anticipation of the event. I also can’t wait for it – a Caribbean carnival! First time experience yey! Although we probably won’t be able to enjoy the main shows as you need to pay entrance. But there will be many shows on the streets of course. I’ll try post some pictures if possible, but otherwise I’ll update you next time :) And of course there is lots I need to update you on the ongoing fundraising activities...hhhmmm...next time.
Take care.

Volcano Hike (I did it again!) - 31 May

A survival trip indeed! We hiked tough trails and camped overnight (no tents), with little supplies (objective to fend from the nature - which luckily has a lot to offer over here). I went with a group hiking the volcano from the winward side of the island and camping overnight at the top of the volcano - a longer but less tough route than from our side (leeward). It was doable, but the night was rougher than expected - we got drenched head to toe!! It rained all night and we only had our sleeping bags and no shelter (there's really nothing much at the top of the volcano, only a few bushes). I think I've never been so wet in my life, but I survived!
Compare the pic of the dome in the crater with earlier post - is it expanding...??

Half Way...

(Middle Street!)

So it’s half-way through the program and I know I keep saying it, but I’ll say it again…time flies! Really, we have done so much in the past three months that it’s been difficult to keep a proper journal on a daily basis. We wrote our midway evaluation reports this week and have had a midway evaluation meeting, which has been a great way to reflect on what we’ve done and learnt so far and to plan what we still need to work on or improve.
In the past three months we have had various courses and have carried out fundraising and community activities. We have had courses on, for example, African History, on Latin America and the Caribbean History, on HIV and AIDS and on Current Development issues. We have worked on assignments individually and in groups with special focus on presentation methods and skills. The group assignments have been great training for me since I usually work best alone and can manage my own time, but in a group it is about cooperation, motivation, patience, division of tasks and much more which are great skills to learn and I think I have managed well so far ; ) It is particularly interesting for me to work in teams because I am not so creative so I can learn a lot from others, and anyway two minds is greater than one, usually! ; ) We have also had individual evaluation ‘tests’ once a week which included questions related to courses as well as experiences, for example on fundraising activities we’ve carried out. These weekly evaluations have been a great help for me to reflect on the past weeks, especially on what I have learnt.
For community work, I have been involved in the Mini TCE project, as mentioned in an earlier posting, in a nearby community. It has been great training and preparation for the TCE project which I will go to in South Africa. It has been wonderful to get a chance to talk to locals and people have been very responsive despite that we appear in their homes when they might be busy or resting. We usually go on Saturdays, which is a good day as most people are at home and we have more time to cover different areas. It’s really good exercise too: Walking to the village in the morning for just over an hour (up a steep hill!), walking house to house all day, and walking back in the evening. What we normally do during these visits is: Informing about the HIV and AIDS community work of our school; Generally informing about HIV and AIDS, transmission, prevention, etc; Informing on statistics (in the world and in St Vincent) and on social implications, especially stigmatization; Informing about testing methods and testing clinics in nearby hospitals; Distributing FAQ booklets, condoms, leaflets (and demonstrations) on proper condom use.
Regarding fundraising, I did expect fundraising to be difficult in St Vincent. After all it is a poor country as well. The biggest challenge for us as a team has been following previous teams who have done the same thing in such a small place. I did expect that I needed to be creative and innovative in terms of fundraising, but it has been more challenging that I expected. I thought that we would be able to continue a lot of the activities carried out by the previous teams, but this has proven very difficult because we are approaching the same people previous teams approached and we are having to explain and re-justify our cause. But I think we have done a great job so far despite the difficulties. I have tried to be involved in as many fundraising activities as possible to not only keep my motivation through variety, but especially to gain experience in different fundraising activities. I have done some street fundraising, door to door visits, contacting businesses for donations and sponsorships, selling second-hand clothes and shoes and requesting for needed material donations from here and abroad. I have also personally contributed to our fundraising by selling Kenyan traditional jewelry which a very special person sent over to me from Kenya (can't thank you enough!!). In the next period we really need to organise the fundraising better and we need to work on the new ideas that we have, for example, organising a raffle and bingo events. I have already been involved in the initial preparations for the raffle and I will assist in everything else! (we are still looking for donations of prizes for these events…hint hint, e.g. a cell phone).
In the next period we will also specialize more in preparation for our projects in Africa and also start to draw up a work plan together with our project leaders (via remote contact). We will carry out more specific assignments related to our projects. We have a database with lots of assignments, theoretical as well as practical. For example, I already completed an assignment on AIDS orphans in South Africa, looking at the statistics and social problems such as stigmatization. I’m carrying out this kind of research in advance to learn more about the situation of HIV and AIDS in South Africa since that is what I am going to work on in the TCE project. I will also learn to give classes/courses on this topic.
Overall I have had a great experience in the last three months. I have met lovely people at the program and in the communities. I’m looking forward to the next period of training and to new experiences. Personally I need to improve some things such as people-mobilization skills (it’s easy with kids, more difficult with adults!). As a team we need to work on better organization and planning of activities and to improve internal communication (sounds like any team in any organization right??)
Ok, I’ll keep you posted : )
HUGS!

"Open saturday" - 24 May

Past saturday, we invited people from the neighbouring communities we work with, kids and adults, for an “Open Saturday” - A day to spend time together at our school, for others to meet us and for us to meet others (since we work in different areas and with different activities). It was also a chance for them to get to see our school and get to know more about our program and how we live. The day was full of different activities, including face painting, origami, musical chairs, sports, etc. Mostly kids came so it was really busy : ) and super fun!

Creativity...

Hi again. Hope you are all doing well! So it seems like I’ll be writing on average twice a month from now on… I can’t believe how fast the time is flying. We’re already in the peak of the dry season. It hasn’t rained for a while now which is strange for us who have been used to regular showers since we arrived. It’s still quite green though, so it doesn’t feel that dry. But enough about the weather. What we’ve been up to lately is more courses and more fundraising. We have had one week break from fundraising and have had courses on HIV & AIDS education. Two volunteers who have just completed their project work in Namibia and have been doing promotion work from here gave us a course, sharing their experiences and giving us tips on different teaching methods and approaches for the projects we’re going to. There are many things to take into consideration in teaching methods such as creativity, energy and variation. Most of us are going to be teachers or to support teaching or training programs and we all have different talents and skills which we can share and learn from each other, for example, there is one guy who’s really good at poetry, a girl who’s a great actress and many people who are very artistic. All these skills are very useful as engaging and effective teaching methods. We’re also still working on our presentation skills, especially on variation of presentation styles. We really have to learn how to present/teach without the use of a computer, mainly due to uncertainty of availability of electricity and equipment, but especially to encourage interaction, we learn alternative ways such as use of art, theater etc. It sounds very obvious but it’s very different when you have to actually do it, be creative and think of something different and original (different from the other 10 something people!) and engaging, usually with little preparation time, lots of improvising and most importantly to get your message across. Even though I know for sure that we are going to face completely different situations in our projects, this is a good training to give us different experiences which we can apply to different situations. For example, if we are going to work more with children, we can use songs or games in teaching and if we are working more with adults we can use theater or poetry. Of course all methods are equally useful for all ages and all settings, it’s just a matter of knowing/understanding your students and their needs.
Anyway, aside from the lessons we’re continuing with community work and with fundraising activities. These activities are very good for meeting new people, networking and getting to know Vincentians better. We have also been to the other side of the island (we are located on the Leeward side and the other side is known as the Winward or Country side). We have been door-to-door fundraising and informing about our school and the Hiking Center (if you have checked out the site, you’ll see that we have a Hiking Center where people can stay, to hike the volcano or to check out the surrounding area which has waterfalls and nice beaches). The other side of the island also has some major attractions which I still have to see, if I get some time :)
Must go now and think of more ways to fundraise! I must say our team has been quite creative (we’re learning!) with the fundraising efforts, including baking lots of different kinds of snacks to sell, making hats, bracelets and necklaces to sell. I have also received some donations of traditional accessories which I am selling to fundraise – A HUGE THANKS to the donator – you know who you are!
Thanks all and hope you don’t mind my silence until I write again…
Ciao

South Africa and TCE it is!

Hi all! I hope you have been following the updates on the school’s site, you’ll see that we are really getting on with the community work. As mentioned in my earlier post, we’ve already started with community work in the neighbouring villages and I am involved with the HIV/AIDS education activities. I got involved with this community activity because I was already interested in learning more about HIV/AIDS and working in the related projects of Humana. In the meantime we've received the available projects and positions, have studied them and have made our choices! So I decided to go to South Africa because they offered a very interesting HIV/AIDS project called “Total Control of the Epidemic” (TCE), an awareness and prevention programme which has a more practical approach to the fight against the epidemic. I will tell you more about it later but in the meantime you can read an overview on the Humana website if you like: http://www.humana.org/TextPage.asp?MenuItemID=48&SubMenuItemID=116
I’m actually the only one from my team going to South Africa, but I will be working with other Development Instructors (DI’s) from other DI schools so it’s an opportunity to meet other volunteers. My other team mates are going to Malawi and Mozambique, to projects such as Teacher Training Colleges, Child Aid, Farmer’s Club and also TCE.
From now on we will be training more specifically for our projects. We’ll still be working as a team, but we will have additional individual assignments related to our projects, for example I just completed a research assignment looking into the problem of AIDS orphans in South Africa, especially the stigma they face, and what is being done and what more can be done to support these increasing numbers of orphans. FYI, there were estimated to be around 1 200, 000 AIDS orphans in South Africa in 2005 (UNAIDS). There are many more unimaginable figures which you just wouldn’t believe (just Google)! It’s good to know that I will soon be doing something, anything! about the desperate situations of affected people, but for now I have to learn a lot. I’m already getting a lot of training through the “Mini-TCE” activities which we are carrying out over here as part of the community work. This involves going door-to-door providing information to people about HIV/AIDS and explaining the importance of getting tested and where and how they can get tested, distributing free condoms and providing proper condom-use demonstrations. In the beginning it was quite difficult because we were not sure how to approach and speak to people or how people will respond, but people here are quite open to talk about HIV/AIDS and are very grateful for the work we are doing.
It is great to be doing something for the community and learning a great deal from it. The activities in the communities really bring us closer to the people, although people are very open and friendly here anyway and it is easy to chat to anyone on the street.
For now, it’s about time for a break :-) We have this weekend off (normally we only have one day in the week off). We’ll be going down to the Grenadines for some sun! It has actually been raining a lot on the main island, more than usual for the dry season and we are not getting as much sun as usual, but it’s still warm ;-) so no complaints. Then it’s back to another week of fundraising next week (yey!).
Take care all.

Even more greenery!

Visit to waterfalls on my free day. Enjoy the pics.

More Learning...

Ok, so the first fundraising week is over and we did not reach our target for the week :( but we are not too far behind and there are still ongoing activities until the next fundraising period. Some of the ongoing activities are garage sales and sponsorship letters and of course home donations. The last few days have been more theoretical – we’ve been studying African and Caribbean history and current poverty issues. We’ve been practicing presentations skills – mostly without the computer because there will rarely be any electricity or equipment such as projectors at the projects we’re going to. A lot of us have little experience with giving presentations or public speaking and those who do have some experience are used to using programs like PowerPoint. So now we all have to learn to be more creative in presenting and later we will be preparing and giving whole courses. After all, we are training to become ‘instructors’ and most of the projects involve educating people so in addition to the knowledge we are getting, the sharing of the knowledge is also important to be done as efficiently as possible. The multicultural environment we are living in with people having different levels of the English language is great training for the volunteer work later on. In the projects we go to, we will be working with rural people who mostly don’t speak the national language (for example, English in Malawi and South Africa and Portuguese in Mozambique). So even though some of us are already learning Portuguese or improving their English depending on the countries they are interested in going to, we will all have to learn a local language wherever we go. Apart from the theoretical work, we’ve also been preparing the community work for the neighbouring communities. The previous teams already started some outreach activities such as computer classes, HIV/AIDS education, sports for kids and recreational activities with handicapped kids, which we are continuing, but we are also starting up new activities which people in the community have told us they are interested in, such as a women’s club and art club for kids. We will be doing community work on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons and all day Saturday. It takes a lot of time as we have to walk around everywhere. I will be more involved with the HIV/AIDS education which includes going door to door talking to people and trying to answer any questions they have as well as trying to get more people to get tested and informing them about the clinics they can go to and distributing condoms while encouraging safe sex. Other activities include sexual education courses at schools (more like supporting the ones that are already provided) and working in partnership with various institutes and organizations to raise awareness and to provide material such as condoms and information material as well testing resources. I have already visited a village and was amazed at how people are really interested and willing to get involved in the various activities as well as to cooperate with the HIV/AIDS education. Even when we have woken someone from their afternoon nap, or afternoon baking, no one was annoyed at us (I would probably be annoyed if I was awoken from my nap for a bunch of volunteers asking silly questions! ;) Anyway I do want to make it clear though that we are doing the community work because there is an interest for it in the community and not because we are using the community to get some training for Africa! It is great training no doubt – it’s the situation of ‘killing two birds with one stone’ ;)
Alright, I’ll try write again soon. For now, wishing you all well!