Fecal Analysis, Book Donations II and Reading List

[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!

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:

1. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail -Hunter S. Thompson
2. Side Effects - Woody Allen
3. The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman
4. Freakanomics - Levitt and Dubner
5. The Nasty Bits - Anthony Bourdain
6. A Long Way Gone: Memoir of a Boy Soldier - Ishmael Beah
7. The World According to Garp - John Irving
8. Hot, Flat and Crowded - Thomas Friedman
9. Sex, Drugs and Coco Puffs - Chuck Klosterman
10. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas -Hunter S. Thompson
11. Sarah Palin: how a hockey mom turned the political establishment upside down - Kaylene Johnson (don't ask)
12. Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama
13. Complete Idiot's Guide to Judaism - Rabbi Benjamin Blech
14. Pnin - Vladamir Nabakov
15. Dreams from my Father-Barack Obama
16. The Watchmen - Allen Moore
17. In Our Image: Americas empire in the Philippines - Stanley Karnow
18. Salt: A World History - Mark Kurlansky
19. Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth
20. Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond
21. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
22. I am America and So Can You - Stephen Colbert
23. The Next 100 Years - George Friedman
24. Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
25. Island - Aldous Huxley
26. The Rum Diary - Hunter S. Thompson
27. Over the Edge of the World: Biography of Magellan - Laurence Bergreen
28. Hell's Angels - Hunter S. Thompson
29. 1968 - Mark Kurlansky
    

Received the Boxes of Books from Emmy!

Yesterday we finally received five boxes of books donated to our school. They contained lots of fiction, non-fiction, National Geographic magazines and some school supplies.

You may remember the penpal program I started with my friend Emmy in California. She worked for an organization called YCS and with a group of high school-aged students that we paired with 15 of my students last school year. In a generous gesture, each of Emmy's students collected books in a book drive, loaded them up into balikbayan boxes and shipped them, along with their letters back to my students as YCS tshirts, to my school. I do not know how many books we have yet though students as well as teachers are excited to start checking them out!

I will be meeting with the penpal group today to distribute their response letters and tshirts later this afternoon. Their smiles were bigger than a crescent moon, and just as bright, once I announced the meeting.

Book Donation Turnover

Last Sunday, June 28th, there was a Parent, Teacher, Community Association (PTCA) meeting to address quite a few topics pertaining to the beginning of school. One such topic was the official turnover of the books donated by my grandmother and members of her community.

As per Philippine tradition, when something is donated, there is an official ceremony wherein the donor symbolically turns over that which is being donated to the recipient. Because my Gram and the other participants could not be present, I stood in for them, passing on ownership of the books to the school before the entire PCTA.

The most haunting fear of doing development work is in the form of a question and is two-fold: is what I am doing sustainable and will this actually make a difference?

This morning I received a text from the head of the English department, Ma'am Alming Montonez, that said the following:

"Am now using your books; the activity is 'Response to Literature' for all 4th year. They will stay in the library every Friday the entire 1st quarter."

That simple text validates the efforts I have put into the project as well as those put in by my Gram and her community members. Being a long-term volunteer has its ups and downs and small acknowledgments like that text message really put me on a cloud like nothing else I have ever experienced.

Ma'am Rachel Cuevas Introducing Me

Me Addressing the PCTA on Behalf of my Gram and her Community

Back To School

As a time-honored tradition, I got my haircut before school started. Sitting in the plastic chair, i felt that same anxiousness I was so familiar with as a student all those years and I began to wonder if all teachers feel that. I'm sure not every teacher goes to Target to get a G.I. Joe or Barbie lunch pale, but they must still experience those same feelings they did when they were kids, picking what design they wanted on their accompanying thermos.

It's wonderful to be back at school, at the time of this writing about a week and one half in. Already the malaise of summer has dissipated and I find I have a reason to wake up every morning. Classes have not yet started, per-se, but I have had some great opportunities both for project preparation and completion.

I would first like to mention and thank Grandma Pickle and her community who donated 171 books to my school on their own dime, which I received about 3 weeks ago. I have also spent months planning with a fellow Namibia program colleague, Emily Negrin, to connect her students in California with my students in a penpal program. Over the months, the penpal program snowballed into a books and materials drive, gifts from her students to ours. I anticipate receiving 5 boxes of books and materials from Emily and her students for our library and the use of our students.

With regards to Gram, her friends and community, Emily and her students, the hardest thing about doing development work is being able to count on people. Many of you have told me that what I am doing is good, a mitzvah and charitable and noble work, but without people like them, people like me are nothing but a drain on the community in which we planned on serving. They pump the lifeblood through my veins and through the veins of my community. With that, I say, and I think we all say, daghan salamat po (many thanks, with respect).

As for other projects that have been keeping me busy, I just finished building a Linux-based firewall called Smoothwall. I have never worked with Linux before and it proved to be more challenging than I had anticipated. All in all, building and introducing the Smoothwall server into our network took a good 7 hours. Smoothwall protects our entire network from hackers, caches data to free up bandwidth, blocks specified content like porn and lets us monitor overall network traffic. My principle, Ma'am Rachel, was very impressed. I would like to be sure to give a special thanks to Dr. Dave in batch 266 for his patience and guidance.

Otherwise, being back at school means hanging out with the students. Here is a video of the fourth year ICT students doing a 20 person human knot on the first day of school.

The kids really make it all worth it. People back home can break their backs getting books to our library and I have spent 9 hour days at school working on computer projects, but the kids really make it all worth it. I feel so much older all of a sudden than I actually am. To conclude this post, Attached is a candid picture Sir Erwin took of me wasting time with some of the fourth year ICT students, showing them pictures from my Europe trip; apparently Aaron has a handsome nose.