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Saturday, December 15 2007 @ 07:11 PM PST
Contributed by: DJ DC
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Some of you know my friend Orelia Busch from Madison, WI. She is doing a stint in the Peace Corps until this coming August. While there, she has initiated a project that will put solar panels on the community center in the village she is working in. To do that she needs to raise $2,200 to fund it. Since she took my strategy to help fund it (asking people not to buy her a gift and donate the money they would have spent to the project), I'm going to help her get the word out to get donations and fund the project.
With 3,100 members here on FUUSE, if everyone here donated ONE DOLLAR to the project, she can fully fund it through our efforts. Below, I posted her email to me (which was a community email to friends so I apologize if her friends are seeing this a second time) which talks about her work in Burkina Faso, and a little more on the project and what it means to the village, as well as a link to the Peace Corps funding web site.
I hope all you on FUUSE and the UU YA community can help a fellow UU try to (quite literally) bring light to other parts of the world.
Peace!
David Concepcion
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Season's Greetings and happy random and various holidays to everyone out there. I hope you're enjoying the post-Thanksgiving Yuletide countdown and that the oncoming winter isn't taking too much of a toll on those of you in more northern climes than I. My mom said that Madison got over 8 inches of snow the other week, or was she exaggerating? From here it's hard to even imagine snow although holidays are also fast approaching and will be celebrated with much gusto and the killing of many sheep, which is traditional on Tabaski, the festival that falls 70 days after the end of Ramadan (on December 19 th this year). I'll be celebrating that with friends in village and making sure that I get a good dose of cheer in on Christmas and New Years' as well, though I'm not yet sure exactly where I'll be. I'm curious to attend a midnight mass Burkinabe style on Xmas eve in my new red and green patterned pagne dress. In any cast the rest of my holidays should prove to be more exciting than my turkey day which was marked with the company of my neighbours in village, the devouring of a giant watermelon, and the consumption of a couple of litres of local millet beer.
Meanwhile my work creeps along but some of the effects of my presence here are slowly snowballing into tangible results, or at least a greater understanding among the population here of what I have to humbly offer my village. My most regular activities lately, those that actually happen as opposed to those that are consistently postponed, have been with afterschool student clubs at both the primary and secondary schools.
On Tuesday afternoons I've been working on building up a core group of interested 14-17 year-old girls in order to train them on peer education techniques on subjects such as teen pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, girls' and womens' rights and other gender issues relevant to their lives. We're still just getting started and getting to know each other through theatre games and other activities that help them learn to express themselves and build a cohesive team. Starting this week and continuing after the holidays I'll be using a curriculum provided by Peace Corps as well as some short films created by African youth to spark some discussions about HIV/AIDS and answer some of their questions on the subject. By the end of the school year I'll be working with the girls to come up with and present short skits that portray their lives and difficulties in order to pass information that they think is important for their peers to know and provoke some thought and self-awareness and maybe even some behaviour change among the student population of my village.
On Thursday mornings as well as some afternoons I've been working on another theatre-based project about health and hygiene with some 4 th grade girls and boys from both primary schools in the village. The idea is to help a group of 10 kids make up a skit covering a different theme every month or so and then present that skit, in local language, to the other students and parents at each school. They cover the basics of health and hygiene in school as well but it's always helpful to reinforce these lessons. At the same time the activities are designed to educate whole families and help parents, most of whom haven't been to school, get involved in their kids' academic lives. This month we practiced a skit showing everyone why it's important to keep your living area clean and wash your hands with soap and water before eating or preparing food. Unfortunately we won't be able to present our skit this month because of a tight schedule of teachers' meetings and the fact that several kids have decided to drop out of the group. Instead of getting discouraged I'm just going to keep trying. Next month's topic is vaccination, and I'm hoping that with the end-of-harvest fieldwork done I'll have an easier time getting the kids to show up. The success of any activity around here, be it with kids or adults, often depends on my constantly reminding people that it's happening and cajoling them to come.
Another project of mine that some of you may be aware of is the ongoing effort to get solar panels fixed to the roof of the community centre in my village so that we can light the place up and begin giving evening classes in French for young people and adults who haven't been able to receive a formal education. I've run the project through the Peace Corps Partnerships Project initiative which helps volunteers fund a side variety of projects by facilitating private donations. I'm excited and proud to tell you all that my project has finally made it to the website and is waiting to get funded!
The completion of this project could give many people in my area the opportunity to improve their quality of life. In addition to lighting up the place, the electricity gathered from these solar panels could help the community use the centre's resources that aren't currently available to them such as a water tower for irrigation and outlets for battery charging or plugging in a refrigerator. They will be able to take advantage of materials such as a television and speakers that are available through the NGO that built the building but are expensive to use regularly with a generator due to high fuel prices. Instead of chasing after each other for contributions that they can't always afford and wasting gas villagers and others working for the development of my area will have a renewable, clean and virtually cost-free energy source. If there's one resource the Burkina will never run out of it's sunlight! The centre will become an even more popular (ie; the only) place for village meetings and official gatherings and the rent collected from these meetings will feed back into villagers' revenue generating activities. Electricity will make village groups that are already running several successful activities look even more attractive to funding structures here in Burkina and will increase the likelihood of the community receiving funds for future projects.
The community itself is required to contribute at least 25% of the cost of the purchase of the solar panels and necessary equipment and will provide all of the labour to install them and secure them against theft. For my part I'm supposed to supervise the use of the donations for project costs only and ensure that the work is completed before my close of service next August.
Not surprisingly, it also falls into my court to do everything I can to speed up the donation process by taking advantage of the spirit of holiday giving. A Unitarian Universalist friend of mine recently wrote me about how his minister challenged the entire congregation to cut their Christmas spending in half and donate the rest of what they would have spent on presents to charity. He took the suggestion a step further and asked everyone he knew to donate the money that they would have spent on a gift for him to a local and national charity of their choosing.
I'm going to take a page straight from his book while giving him full credit for the generous grace and simplicity of his request and ask you to do the same for me. Even if it's five dollars I'd like you to take the money that you'd use to buy me a present if I were home or the money that might send me a package in Burkina, go to the Peace Corps website instead and donate that money to my village.
Here's the link:
<a href="https://www.peacecorps.gov/resources/donors/contribute/projdetail.cfm?projdesc=686-107®ion=africa">https://www.peacecorps.gov/resources/donors/contribute/projdetail.cfm?projdesc=686-107®ion=africa</a>
If that link doesn't work for some reason you can go to the Peace Corps website (http://www.peacecorps.gov), click on the "Donors" section and follow the "volunteer projects" link to my project. Mine is the only one currently listed for Burkina Faso and it has my name on it. The reference number is 686-107. Please feel free to pass this information on to anyone who might be interested in hearing about it. As always, thanks for your continued attention and support. It truly nourishes and sustains me and it's all that I need.
Love and blessings,
O
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| Authored by: DJ DC On Saturday, December 15 2007 @ 07:26 PM PST |
| Sorry about the bad http formatting. The link below should work. Click on it to donate.
https://www.peacecorps.gov/resources/donors/contribute/projdetail.cfm?projdesc=686-107®ion=africa ---
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