My Work for the Foreseeable Future – Thursday, March 21,
2013
Out of IST (Inter-Service Training) came some good work and
a lot of fun. My counterpart was there,
the chief of my youth center, for the first few days, and we worked on and
action plan based on the Community Needs Assessment that I did. At this point, I will be working with the
youth center in a few different ways. I
will continue with the English classes that I’ve been doing and am going to start
a health/life skills class. My post-mate
is already working with them on a business/micro-finance class that I hope to
work with him on, and together we will start a Village Savings and Loan
Association (VLSA) with the students.
For the first six months or so, this will involve mostly
saving with the kids bringing in a small amount of money every couple of weeks
to put in a general fund that can be withdrawn from later. The class that my post-mate teaches will also
help them learn about bookkeeping and budgeting. Eventually, the VLSA will start giving out
small loans to its members, with them paying them back in small increments over
time. We will also begin teaching them
Income Generating Activities (IGAs) – basically small business ideas. We have a few that we plan on doing eventually,
including making a woven bag (called prison bags because they are normally made
by female prisoners), maybe some simple jewelry, either way, we need to find
people from other areas to come in to do trainings.
However, our first idea and the one that we are the most
excited about is… drumroll… onion
rings! They already have beignet batter
that they fry up everyday and onions are ridiculously cheap in this area. All you have to do is dip the onion ring in
the batter and fry it up. We are also
planning fried okra, maybe green beans, I don’t know, whatever is cheap, in-season,
and good fried. We might even be able to
spread this to the rest of the country if it works well. Just wait, Cameroon is about to become the
onion ring capital of West-Central Africa!
I even have a sauce idea that I want to try out – mayo, piemont (the hot
pepper), magi (a seasoning sauce, looks like soy sauce but much weaker), and
elena (a tomato paste). We’ll see how it
works out.
Once things get off the ground at the youth center, I’m
going to start expanding as well. I’d
like to do health/life skills classes at all three Lycées and maybe the women’s
empowerment club. I’m already doing an
English club that I want to continue at the Lycée Classique. I also would like to expand and create more
VSLAs that we can do IGAs with (I know, Peace Corps has a lot of
acronyms).
My Program Manager (PM) put me on the Youth Development (YD) Steering
Committee. It’s the committee that is in
charge of the direction that YD goes. I
will mostly be working on redesigning training for the incoming stage. We found out that YD and Education are going
to be combined into one program, so training will have to be changed
dramatically for next year, something that we’re getting started on now.
I was selected to be on the National Girls Forum (NGF) Committee. This will be the second year for the NGF,
bringing together 30 PCVs, their counterparts, and 30 girls from their towns,
along with NGOs and government organizations to share best practices and
trainings on developing girls and women.
I will be helping to decide what organizations to invite and what sort
of trainings to do.
A few days ago, I was also invited to be a participant in the WASH
(water, sanitation, and hygiene) Committee.
It is a few days in Ebolowa, the capital of the South region, at the end
of April. After this I will be the
‘school sanitation expert for the region, providing advice to PCVs and School
Administrators.’
Regardless, all of these meetings will be held in either Ngaounderé or
Yaoundé, so I will be doing a lot of traveling over the next few months. It will be a pain, but it will also be good
to get away from post every once in a while, see some friends that I normally
wouldn’t be able to, and all of this will be great professional experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment