Mada Update #3 Jan. 22, 2010

Hello again!

First off, I successfully posted pictures of my new site!!!! Just look here:
http://www.corieinmadagascar.shutterfly.com/26

Well, here I am back in Diego! The past couple weeks of welcoming the 36 trainee transfers into the country from Niger overall went really well. Shockingly, none of them chose to go home after all they’ve been through: 2 weeks of training and staying with Nigerian families, then trouble causing them to go into 2 weeks of “consolidation” (if
you remember from my previous blogs…this is Peace-Corp-speak for “wait around and see if you’ll get evacuated”), then being sent to Madagascar and doing it all over again. New culture, new language, new climate, new trainers, etc etc. Their spirits were surprisingly high despite all of that….they seemed to have bonded over it. The Peace
Corps staff, given less than a week to prepare all of the logistics for this new group, was exhausted but in good spirits also. Just imagine if you can, arranging to find good homes for 36 new volunteers all over the country for the next 2 years, 36 temporary “homes” for their home-stays for training, processing visas, shots and new medical files, buying medications, hiring language trainers for many different dialects, etc. etc…..all in less than a week. On top of that, it was a bigger group than Peace Corps is used to handling at one time, and there were 4 kinds of them; Small Enterprise Development, Environment, Health and Education… also more at one time than Peace Corps can usually handle. It was amazing, but everyone came together to get it done so that this group could stay together and not get handed 36 plane tickets back home to the U.S. with a “better luck next time”.
Brittany and I flew in from Diego to train the Environment group, and were later joined by another Health volunteer and another Environment also. We trained on cookstove construction (you can watch an instructional video starring yours truly on my blog), PACA (a long acronym basically meaning tools for assessing community needs),
environmental education, insulated cooker construction, and transplanting improved system of rice. In short though, we taught them some techniques for doing and teaching stuff, and passed along our infinite wisdom of peace corps volunteerism…haha.
So I’ve gotten some questions from one of my adoring fans…haha. Thanks Uncle Dick Beltramini for asking! Question : How do you begin to measure your impact as a volunteer and how do you go about setting goals for your service? (or something like that…)
Well that’s a mighty big question! Setting goals for service should start with the community; seeing what they really want or need and working towards small, realistic goals within that. There are a number of different PACA tools we learn to use (ex; having community members draw a map of their community to see what kinds of things are important to them, by what they put on the map first/at all). Sometimes you can hold bigger more formal meetings with different groups (young, old, women, men, students, etc) and talk about what things are going well and where they see themselves in the future.
Once you’ve identified some key problems, there’s a good system for having them rank these in order of priority. This all can take months to get a good handle on. I did a lot of this in my previous site because I didn’t really have a direction to go from in my service. Now though, I’ve walked right into a site where PACA was already done by
the previous volunteer which I have the results from. I’ve been doing more informal surveying and also have a clearer vision to work towards with the community. There is already the community group that is working on their eco-tourism site, so I’m trying to help them get that to where it can stand on its own two feet without a Peace Corps
Volunteer constantly looking over their shoulders.
As far as measuring progress, well that is an area I think Peace Corps as an organization really needs to work on. As Volunteers, we turn in detailed reports on our activities every 3 months that go through the Country Director then are sent to Washington DC where they are filed away. No one ever formally goes back to these villages months or years later to see how they’re doing and if anything the Volunteer started actually caught on and was sustainable in the end. Some volunteers go back to their villages years later and I’ve heard stories about them being pleasantly surprised by what was now happening maybe because of what they started during their service, but I’m sure it varies widely. I personally feel successful when I see a Malagasy teaching another Malagasy some new technique or concept I’ve introduced. In the end, it’s really hard to say what difference we make in our communities. I know though that it changes a person…it’s changed me for good. One of Peace Corps’ main goals is that when its over, the volunteer bring their knowledge of the experience in the host country back to the U.S. so that other Americans can benefit too. I think one of the main ways Peace Corps is successful is changing the hearts and minds of its volunteers for life; so many Returned Peace Corps Volunteers live a life that includes service of some kind when they get home… a lot of the time, it only begins with Peace Corps.
What it comes down to for me, is working with the community to do the best we can with the resources we have in the time period we have. The idea is to start some sparks and then sit back and watch them turn into fires all on their own. Here is a story I like to remind myself of often:
A man goes out on the beach and sees that it is covered with starfish that have washed up in the tide. A little boy is walking along, picking them up and throwing them back in the water. “What are you doing, son?” The man asks. “You see how many starfish there are? You’ll never make a difference.” The boy paused thoughtfully, and picked up another starfish and threw it into the ocean. “It sure made a difference to that one.” he said.
So there you go. That story is pretty much my personal mission statement for while I’m here. Being here only a year, I have to be realistic about what I can accomplish….and I know that what I’m bringing home in my heart will be of just as much value somehow.
Love from Madagasikara,
--Cor