For the past year, with the exception for a couple of weeks at a time, my site mate and I have been relatively stuck with little to do. Of course, a great deal of the job description of a Peace Corps Volunteer is to rely heavily on your own level of motivation and creativity to get the job done regardless of: limited resources, lack of management, lack of direction (from your org/school or boss), lack of this, and lack of that. One of the ways I've kept from going crazy, because of the lack of direction from my supervisor, is to have an active social life and find other ways to put my degrees/education/experience to work. (For those of you considering joining the Peace Corps with an advance degree and expect that it will be used to the fullest extent, you need to rethink your expectations for service and be ok with the situation if it is not) Be creative.
Well, after several meetings over the past year, in preparation to receive a $500,000.00 grant from PEPFAR, and an extensive planning meeting today, it looks like my restlessness will be no more, or at least not for the next couple of months, because our extended mobile VCT services should be up and running by October. (that was a loooong sentence. My English teacher would not be proud.) I will be responsible for developing the Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) system for the project. That means I would kind of be like Santa Clause when he makes his list and checks it twice to keep tabs on the kids (through out the year) who are naughty and nice. But unlike Santa, I'd have to write a monthly report to our funder, and make changes when things are going well. With Santa, if he thought you needed to change your behavior, you just wouldn't get that red wagon with the wings on the sides. I will also be involved with budget management, as well as developing an HIV prevention strategy and identify curricula that address HIV and behavior change on the community level. Additionally, I'll be involved with HIV training and writing up a policies and procedures booklet for the project as it relates to how things and people should run.
Because I'll be so heavily involved in M&E, I'm planning to take a brush-up online course in program evaluation. If you're interested in M&E and want to do the same or learn, follow the link to my mother's organization: Tobacco Technical Assistance Consortium
The course is distance (computer) based, so you can participate from anywhere in the world, like me! (Shameful family plug, but I don't care, it's by blog!)
I really hope that things turn out well, although they usually do (knock on wood). I'm ready to jump in and get my mind running at top speed again. Since I've been relatively inactive at work, I feel like that little girl in my head has been running around up there, tossing around papers and files that have been kept so neatly organized. It's time to do a Spring cleaning or sorts (which is fitting because the weather is warming up again...it was 26 degrees C today) and prepare for the major tasks ahead! Wish me luck!!!!!!!!
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me and my site mate have been relatively stuck. Change this to "my site mate and me". In a sentence structure, you are always last. Also change the word to curricula not curriculi.
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