Wednesday, February 27th, 2008: Progress progress progress!

The past few days have been fantastic in terms of committee work. It seems like everyone has finally understood our goal for my stay – namely, to write as many funding proposals as possible – and knows the steps we need to take to accomplish it. Over the past few weeks, we've spent meetings discussing basic business concepts and the parts of funding proposals and we've tried to organize their myriad ideas into concise, sensible income-generating projects. For each project, the committee will strive to acquire the initial capital, either through a loan or grant. Then, they will initiate the project by buying required supplies, setting up necessary processes, and hiring paid laborers from the community. The profit from the project will be allocated in part toward the growth of the project and in part toward the development of community infrastructure. Progress has been slow and at times frustrating; for example, I've had to spend some meetings teaching about basic math concepts such as proportions or units of measure. Last week we spent a good deal of time writing a funding proposal for an infrastructure project, and I had to constantly critique the work that was being done. But this week, instead of running the meetings, I simply attend them and sit in a corner; I only speak if I am asked specific questions, or if the group gets seriously off track, and they've nearly completed a funding proposal for a honey production project! They should be finishing that during today's meeting, and then tomorrow we'll be going to Ho to type up this and last week's proposals (we actually go to Ho for computer classes – I'm killing two birds with one stone by teaching them some skills and then giving them the assignment of typing!). Once we have the typed proposals, I'm planning to bring the hard copies to Friday's meeting so that we can do some revisions.

The reason why I'm pushing to get a funding proposal in shape immediately is because a fellow volunteer with Bridge, Catherine, is working on applying to a huge ($250,000) grant whose application is due in the next few weeks. She's asked a few volunteers, myself included, to push our communities to complete proposals that she can group together when applying for the grant, since each of our proposals is only about $50,000 or less. This is an incredible opportunity for Kpeleho; I feel that with Catherine writing on behalf of multiple communities, chances of winning the grant are improved. Without this money, I think it will be a long, long time before Kpeleho can acquire a grant. Of course, this doesn't mean that development will be stunted because they will likely apply for loans, but a grant would give them a push in the right direction, I think.

In other news:
- I've been having vivid dreams since I arrived, which I believe are due to my malaria prophylactic. I'm taking Malarone, not Larium, for this reason; supposedly Larium makes you have crazy dreams and can intensify any latent or mild psychoses that you have (so, all of you at home should be thankful that I didn't choose Larium). But for some reason every night I have either really amazing or really distressing dreams, so it's not uncommon for me to wake during the night because I've started laughing or crying. I have lots of dreams about food – that may just be because I'm beginning to feel the monotony of eating only one type of cuisine on a daily basis. I had a dream the other night that I had a pet bunny and a pet kitten, and the bunny got sick and needed an organ transplant. I took both bunny and kitten to the vet (I had to catch the kitten first, and initially it looked like a hen until I caught it by the scruff of the neck, at which point it turned into a kitten) and planned to have the necessary organ removed from the kitten and transplanted into the bunny. It was something essential, maybe the liver; basically, the kitty would have to die. I put the struggling kitten down on the vet's examining table, where it sat, petrified at what was going to happen next, and I was crying tears of anguish until I realized that the kitten's life wasn't worth more than the bunny's life. Then I dried my tears and whisked my kitten back home, letting the bunny die – its time had come. Hmm. I suppose this one could have been the Malarone, or it could have been a combination of a twisted lesson in bioethics, practice catching struggling farmyard animals, and what happens when you watch a squirrel being butchered.
- One of the foods that I've been craving has been peanut butter. They have something here called groundnut paste, which is just ground peanuts and nothing else. It's usually used in groundnut soup. I discovered that it's actually even more satisfying than peanut butter! When I go home I'm never buying peanut butter again. I'm going to grind my own in a food processor.
- To provide shade, people here put palm canopies in front of their homes. Since I spent a lot of afternoons at Gloria's house, Christopher build a canopy there so I would have shade (further evidence that I'm overly well-taken-of here). He used bamboo that he cut from the bush to build the structure and then piled palm branches on top. For the first couple of days he brought more palm branches and piled them on, until even when the palm branches dried there was no sunlight coming through the canopy. It was pretty cool to see him put it up. Little things like the fact that people use palm canopies are what give this whole experience the real village-y feel.



I think I will close here for now, but more on the rest of my week later!