[Plot Spoiler: my first story in this post is about poop]
Hey there, hi there, ho there! It certainly has been a while. I am well though I had a bit of a scare earlier this week. I had convinced myself that I had intestinal parasites (having experienced 4 or so symptoms we were warned about during training). Psychosomatic or not, I was concerned, so I received the blessing of the Peace Corps Medical Officer and went in to the local medical clinic for a poop test.
Having entered into the medical clinic, I was led around to a building on top of the hill behind the clinic where a physician instructed me to "move my bowels" and collect a sample with a folded piece of construction paper and place that into a small glass vial, which I am certain had assorted uses preceding my own. Okay, so this was fine, I even had some in the bank, so to speak, as to not suffer a shy colon at this moment of truth. But when I stepped into the appointed comfort room (CR) some of my involuntary muscles clenched! The CR was lightless, had a soaked toilet bowl rim with no seat, no toilet paper and no running water although there was a bucket with a plastic ladle.
I guess sometimes you gotta just roll up your sleeves, avail of the construction paper pooper scooper and pray you don't get your shorts soaked by the ladle.
After the deed was done, I was again led all over the campus to deliver the specimen, which my host brother, who was with me and wanting to do me a favor, insisted on carrying the vial for me to relieve me of added stress. Waiting about 40 minutes outside of the clinic, my host brother and I watched a chicken pecking across the parking area and joked about being hungry, stoning it and eating it raw (see why I was concerned about parasites!?). The clinician came back out and looked nervous, which startled me. I greeted her in Visaya (at which point she looked very relieved, most provincial clinicians do not speak very good English) and told me the results were negative and that I owed 30 pesos ($0.60) to the front counter for the test. She also instructed me to get a followup test the next day.
Anyway, I decided to forgo the followup test since we have mandatory testing in December when my volunteer batch will all meet in Manila for our mid-service training.
--->
In COMPLETELY different news, my school has yet again 
received two boxes of books, this time from my Gram and her local Optimists Club. At this point, donors have sent my humble school over 500 books, well over doubling our library's collection!
received two boxes of books, this time from my Gram and her local Optimists Club. At this point, donors have sent my humble school over 500 books, well over doubling our library's collection! My latest project has been working with the fourth year to catalog all of the donated books into a digital database, a first in my school's history! But how to go about this? Keeping the database on a local computer would be great, but what about data corruption and/or hardware failure? We needed a cloud-based (which is to say internet-based) solution. I happen to follow a couple volunteers in South Africa on Twitter, @stevegerner and @fizzyh2o, who recommended that we use a service from librarything.com. The two of them are currently engrossed in a project building libraries in South Africa and have a webpage explaining that project, which I encourage all my readers to check out; you can find a link to a Peace Corps hosted website detailing their project here.
So as I said, the fourth year has been hard at work encoding ISBNs and other information into our cloud-based database and at the time of this writing, we have 256 entries! If you are interested (and this is certainly a benefit of having a cloud-based solution), you can visit our virtual library to see what kinds of books our donors have been sending here.
But there was just one problem I hadn't anticipated using the online database! The free account only allows for 200 books to be encoded; a lifetime membership costs roughly 950 pesos ($19), a whopping sum where people live on about 50 pesos a day, all for an intangible investment in a rejuvenated library. Where would the money come from? The more I thought about it, the more it made sense to ask the school to pay for it; "ownership" is a bigtime buzz word in development and in the Peace Corps. This is a very nontechnical definition but ownership refers to an investment made by the target community to acquire resources. It is one thing to donate and provide goods and services for free (me volunteering my time here and the donors sending us books) but the community has not made an "investment" in making those free goods and services sustainable. By having my agency invest money into this project they are now stakeholders in the project and have a vested interest in its success and perpetuation.
I spent the better part of an afternoon drafting a proposal to submit to my principle, doing a cost/benefit analysis and practically begging that the school invest in this component of the project. The next day, the principle came in to see how we were doing and, before I could pitch my proposal, my counterpart, Sir Erwin, asked Ma'am Rachel to fund our membership. She looked around for a moment and approved of it in a matter of seconds! Working with Ma'am Rachel is a volunteer's dream come true! We now are the proud owners of a lifetime membership to librarything.com with an unlimited resource for encoding our books for the future growth of the library.
As I said, the fourth year was able to encode 256 books in a matter of two hours, during which time we had a brown out losing power and therefor access to librarything.com. But the power came back and the students finished for the day by taking some R&R and spending some quality time with that which they had worked so hard to enter into the database. Honestly, one can spend hours coordinating donations, hours researching viable and sustainable resources to compliment the project and hours having students enter book information into the database, but really, this is what it's all about (the student facing the camera is the principle's daughter):
More pictures are available here on my Picasa web albums page.
--->
Speaking of books, I wanted to include my own reading list:
But there was just one problem I hadn't anticipated using the online database! The free account only allows for 200 books to be encoded; a lifetime membership costs roughly 950 pesos ($19), a whopping sum where people live on about 50 pesos a day, all for an intangible investment in a rejuvenated library. Where would the money come from? The more I thought about it, the more it made sense to ask the school to pay for it; "ownership" is a bigtime buzz word in development and in the Peace Corps. This is a very nontechnical definition but ownership refers to an investment made by the target community to acquire resources. It is one thing to donate and provide goods and services for free (me volunteering my time here and the donors sending us books) but the community has not made an "investment" in making those free goods and services sustainable. By having my agency invest money into this project they are now stakeholders in the project and have a vested interest in its success and perpetuation.
I spent the better part of an afternoon drafting a proposal to submit to my principle, doing a cost/benefit analysis and practically begging that the school invest in this component of the project. The next day, the principle came in to see how we were doing and, before I could pitch my proposal, my counterpart, Sir Erwin, asked Ma'am Rachel to fund our membership. She looked around for a moment and approved of it in a matter of seconds! Working with Ma'am Rachel is a volunteer's dream come true! We now are the proud owners of a lifetime membership to librarything.com with an unlimited resource for encoding our books for the future growth of the library.
As I said, the fourth year was able to encode 256 books in a matter of two hours, during which time we had a brown out losing power and therefor access to librarything.com. But the power came back and the students finished for the day by taking some R&R and spending some quality time with that which they had worked so hard to enter into the database. Honestly, one can spend hours coordinating donations, hours researching viable and sustainable resources to compliment the project and hours having students enter book information into the database, but really, this is what it's all about (the student facing the camera is the principle's daughter):
More pictures are available here on my Picasa web albums page.--->
Speaking of books, I wanted to include my own reading list:
- Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail -Hunter S. Thompson
- Side Effects - Woody Allen
- The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman
- Freakanomics - Levitt and Dubner
- The Nasty Bits - Anthony Bourdain
- A Long Way Gone: Memoir of a Boy Soldier - Ishmael Beah
- The World According to Garp - John Irving
- Hot, Flat and Crowded - Thomas Friedman
- Sex, Drugs and Coco Puffs - Chuck Klosterman
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas -Hunter S. Thompson
- Sarah Palin: how a hockey mom turned the political establishment upside down - Kaylene Johnson (don't ask)
- Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama
- Complete Idiot's Guide to Judaism - Rabbi Benjamin Blech
- Pnin - Vladamir Nabakov
- Dreams from my Father-Barack Obama
- The Watchmen - Allen Moore
- In Our Image: Americas empire in the Philippines - Stanley Karnow
- Salt: A World History - Mark Kurlansky
- Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth
- Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond
- Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
- I am America and So Can You - Stephen Colbert
- The Next 100 Years - George Friedman
- Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
- Island - Aldous Huxley
- The Rum Diary - Hunter S. Thompson
- Over the Edge of the World: Biography of Magellan - Laurence Bergreen
- Hell's Angels - Hunter S. Thompson
- 1968 - Mark Kurlansky
Sean,
ReplyDeleteHow detailed you are in ALL of your experiences! So, what else can I say... KEEP IT COMING! We're glued to your blog!!