Successes!

I have been on cloud nine lately. My successes have become plentiful and my joy abounding. Things have truly come together for me in a really positive way, both in terms of my life and my projects, and I couldn't be happier. The latter, in particular, is what I wish to share: project successes!

Scouts

The Scout troop that I am working with has reached a new high. First, our normally small group of 25 kids has grown to over 60 kids attending each meeting this term with many more pounding the pavement to sign up. The kids are not the only ones who are excited to participate - we have had six new teachers ask to participate in one capacity or another! This is a far cry from our initial months, where the other PCV and I felt like we were pulling teeth just to meet with a single teacher to get things off the ground. And, as if to reward our troop for its efforts, we won a prestigious award for the school. The award totaled BWP 12,000.00 (a ridiculously huge sum in Botswana!) and our troop has also been invited to compete against other troops from the area next week in two categories: marching and entertainment/drum-line! The kids and teachers have been meeting every single day after school to practice and are looking ready to strut their stuff! This is huge for our troop, which only started this past term! Go Segoditshane Scouts!

Gabane Community Home-Based Care

As I mentioned a few days ago, my NGO in Gabane was selected as one of only ten organizations as part of the Southern African Development Community's HIV/AIDS Fund, which aims to strengthen CBO/NGO organizational capacity for the HIV response in Botswana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. I did not confirm to the blog-o-sphere but we did receive the official invitation from SADC and went to the welcome banquet and continued assessment interviews yesterday in Gaborone. These interviews went swimmingly! The women from my NGO also were invited (as part of this event) to attend an introductory workshop led by notable experts from Southern Africa on a variety of topics, including: leadership and governance, financial management, and aligning programs to Botswana's National Strategic Framework.

Today, when I came into the NGO, the women that had attended the workshop were already elbow deep in the notes and powerpoint slides they received yesterday. They were going through the papers and "studying". I sat with them to help clarify some of the details and translate some of the jargon. After some time, the women stopped and looked at me with a sense of urgency then proclaimed: "We are going to work very hard to learn everything and prove to these folks that we are the best out here - that we want to learn and we want to do more. That way, when the training portion is over and they are looking to help with funding, they will know they can trust us to get the job done and do our best." My heart skipped a beat - this is every Peace Corps Volunteer's dream come true. And, the best part about it, I know that they mean it and that they truly will do everything in their power to make the most of this opportunity.

BOCAIP Tumelong Counseling and Childcare Center

It has been a long time since I have mentioned my old NGO in Kumakwane. As you can probably recall, it closed many months ago. This was devastating, not only because it meant that I had to move from a village that I loved so much but also because it meant hundreds of children would be going without the care and services they desperately need. Not wanting to see this happen, I continued working on proposals up until the minute I left but, sadly, had not heard anything from those submissions. Well, yesterday I received a call from a friend from Kumakwane that I used to work with who informed me that Tumelong was being repainted and cleaned up. I immediately asked for more details. It turns out that one of the proposals that I had written before moving had finally come through! The NGO now has funding to run the daycare center and the afterschool program for an entire year! (Note: the funding will carry them through June 2013, my expected end-of-service date! Hooray!) The facility is getting polished up and ready to re-open next month! That means, once again (and finally), that all my Kums Kids are going to have a place to go for food, psychosocial support, and fun! We did it!

Basically, what all of this means is that all of my service's key projects, even those that I thought were long gone, are having a banner month and I am reveling in their success!

Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Segoditshane Scouts Term 1 Excursion

For the last nine weeks, I have been working with the Segoditshane Scouts Troop. The troop is comprised of about 25 core scout members aged 9- to 14-years-old (plus another 55 or so kids that come for the occasional meeting) and is lead by myself and three other troop leaders (another Peace Corps Volunteer and two teachers from Segoditshane Primary School). We have been engaging the kids in a variety of activities, including: environmental awareness and conservation, outdoor education, critical thinking games, and marching (which is a huge hit in Botswana). The kids have grown up and grown together a lot during the term, which has truly been fun to watch. 

For the close of the school term, the other scout troop leaders and I decided to reward the scouts for all their hard work and dedication by taking them on an excursion. We wanted to do something that would be both fun and educational. After a lot of deliberation, we decided to take the kids to the Gaborone Game Reserve so they could see and learn about animals and the environment. This ended up being the right choice if, for no other reason, than most of these kids had never seen any sort of wildlife in their country!


The Gaborone Game Reserve is a game park and conservation center inside the capital city of Gaborone. Its main function is to educate people about the environment and some of the animals commonly found around Botswana. This was the perfect fit for our scouts, who had focused a lot this term on learning about nature and becoming more aware of their surroundings.

We set to meet at 7:00AM to head to the game reserve, knowing that animals are most active in the early morning hours. The excited scouts arrived on time (a rarity in Botswana) and were bouncing off the walls with anticipation, despite the fact that it was POURING RAIN. (Of course it was - it rains a handful of times per year and it had to be on our excursion day. But, fear not, nothing was going to rain on our parade! hehe) On top of the rain, the bus was over an hour-and-a-half late and then, once it did arrive, they sent a coach bus for 25 children to go on a game drive (TIA — this is Africa!). We kept reminding ourselves that scouts are prepared for anything so this was just another thing we would deal with on our way to big fun!

By the time we finally arrived at the game park it had stopped raining. (Hooray!) We started the day by getting told information about the game park, the different animals and foliage we would see, and about the importance of conservation especially in Botswana. The kids were antsy - their eyes darting around hoping to spot their first kudu or zebra - but they listened attentively and participated as much as they could muster in the conversation. This was followed by about an hour and a half game drive which had the kids literally jumping out of their seats! They were running back and forth on the bus, squealing, and pointing out animals that they saw along the way! I have to admit, it was exciting even for me after having been on a number of game drives since coming to Botswana, but the true joy in the whole experience was watching the kids see their first animals ever! Their eyes would become the size of soccer balls and they would smack my leg as they pointed out ostriches and springbok and all sorts of other animals. It was a heartwarming experience and one that made this extra special for me.

After about an hour or so of driving around the park, we stopped to complete a community service project. In exchange for the cost of park fees, we had agreed to help clean up the area around the education center. (In Botswana they make a great effort to clear grass and brush around buildings because of snakes and other creepy critters that could hide out there otherwise!) This was also really important because scouts give back and we wanted to promote that with our troop and hopefully instill in them a sense of civic responsibility. And, let me tell you, I was so proud of those kids! They set to work, sweat dripping down their faces, and didn't stop until every last bit of that area was immaculate! Even the smallest one of the bunch was doing her part by picking up small rocks and using them to create boundaries for the flower beds. It was teamwork at its finest. They worked so hard that they finished the project in half the time and did even more than was expected of them! 

With our project complete we headed to the picnic area to set up our lunch and were greeted by a band of monkeys. It turned out that the monkeys were as interested in our lunch as we were! One of them even stole an apple right out of the hand of one of the scouts when he wasn’t looking! At first the scout was completely freaked out (who wouldn't be?!) but he later said that it was his favorite experience of the day! 

While a day excursion might not seem like much, it represents a milestone for our group. To make it happen required the cooperation from the school and parents as well as coordinating with government agencies for transport and fee waivers. It was also the first time the teachers had organized such an event for a school club. They did a great job and were proud of the outcome. Plus, any time you can show children what is out there in the world and help motivate them to reach for more, I consider that I pretty good day! It was the perfect inaugural outing for our little troop and I couldn't be happier!

Project Updates

As we approach the one year mark (2 days away!), I thought I would share a short update on a few of the main things that I am working on:

Computer Basics Classes: I continue to teach computer classes to people from my community. So far, classes consist mostly of staff from my NGO and the Clinic. Classes are held once per week and I am offering review sessions two afternoons per week. In an attempt to help make the classes more applicable to their jobs (and so they can better understand the importance of learning how to use the computer), I use these review sessions (and independently scheduled time as requested) as a time to give the computer lessons a practical application. What this means is that I invite the class participants to bring their handwritten reports and/or paperwork in and we convert them into digital files together. Often this means I show them how and then they repeat the effort or, in some instances, I create a framework and they fill in the details. We are lucky enough to have enough computers so that each participant has "their own" computer in the computer lab that they can save their files to so they can continue to modify/work on them as they get more comfortable and gain more skills. For one student who has been exceptionally dedicated to learning, this means she is starting to be taught the very basics in Excel. Among the biggest accomplishments of this class, in my opinion, is that every single person who signed up for the class continues to come each week. They are getting comfortable with typing and with doing basic things in Word. They are motivated and so happy to learn. Success!

Segoditshane Scouts Troop: The Scout troop that I lead, along with another Peace Corps Volunteer and two teachers from Segoditshane Primary School, is going very well. We have approximately fifty scouts aged 9 to 14 that meet once per week to learn a variety of skills, including: practical outdoor activities (camping, hiking, backpacking, sports), environmental conservation, morals/ethics, community service, etc.

Renetswee Happy Home Care Center: I have been rewriting a Constitution for an NGO in a nearby village and helping the Coordinator come up with strategies for programming and recolonization of the new facility once all of the pertinent documents are filed and approved.

Gabane Community Home-Based Care: This is my primary project, so the majority of the work I am doing right now is here. Briefly, I am working in a variety of functions.

• Pre-School Program Curriculum Development: I have been observing classroom activities and teaching styles to help the teachers develop new ways of imparting knowledge onto the children and revise current curricula and/or activities to do with the children (ages 3 to 6). This includes examining end-of-term and year-end exams for the primary schools (where the children will graduate to) and designing projects that help achieve the necessary results for the children's success in accordance with those requirements. The hope is that by providing better curriculums the children will flourish and have a better chance of being successful. Research shows that a child's success in school directly correlates with the dropout rate and therefore their HIV status later in life. If we can get these children, the most vulnerable in our community, to enjoy school and become dedicated to their success while they are young, then we have a better chance of keeping them that way into junior school and beyond.
• Organizational Development: For the first few months at this new site, I have been conducting an analysis of staffing and organizational needs. In doing this, I have put together documents such as job descriptions, forecasting of staffing needs, designing current and forecasted organizational charts, an organizational profile, program leaflets, and a marketing kit.
• Financial Systems/Planning and Budgeting: I have been discussing and training staff on the importance of budgets, record keeping/monitoring expenses and income (payments), and balancing the books. This has included creating a very simple payment database for immediate use by staff while creating and implementing a thorough financial system. I have trained the Administrative Officer on how to use this program and she is getting comfortable using it. In the meantime, I have worked to design and digitize financial systems by creating frameworks and a database to track profit and loss and by putting together program and organizational budgets. (No expenses have ever been tracked at the NGO before so this means researching numbers, gathering receipts, and finding out real costs.) 

Sadly, I also have to report a death of someone I have blogged about. Remember a few weeks ago when I told of my home visits? I discussed a mother who was devastatingly sick with AIDS and in the final stages of her life. I also told that her daughter had recently tested positive for HIV. Well, the daughter has passed away. Immediately after her test, my NGO helped get her admitted to the hospital in Gaborone for treatment. Within a week, she developed TB. On Tuesday the hospital released her to go home because there was nothing else to be done. My NGO planned to visit her yesterday but she died during the night, only hours after returning home. In discussing the loss with the Clinic and NGO staff, it seems the young girl waited too long to test and the virus was too far along. This is a very sad loss of someone far too young. I will continue going on home visits and encouraging people in my community to test early and often.

These are the projects that are currently filling my days and that will carry me into this second year in Botswana.