A Million Little Projects

If you are familiar with the PC’s way of doing things or avidly read my blog, you already know that our first 3 months at site are for observation followed by a 2 week in-service training. When we get back, then it is time to really launch into our projects. IST was great for taking all I observed in terms of assets and deficits in my community and turning them into project ideas. Here are some of my potential projects. Not all of them will happen this year, or even ever, but I wanted to put them out there in case people have experiences they can share or can connect me to other resources.

My major project will be the educational business films that I have talked about many times in my blog. Next week, I am running a workshop on “Cinema Concu”. It will be a mix of devised theater practices and a basic introduction to making movies. The topic of the first film is TBD, but won’t remain that way for long.

Other projects that fall under the CED framework, but aren’t with my partner organization:

Recycled Paper Beads: I work with a groupement that dyes fabric. They are interested in adding another product to their repertoire. I am going to suggest paper beads. They can be beautiful. We will get kids to help clean up the streets by collecting paper trash, use left over dye from the fabric dying to color the paper and then make the beads. I hope to do a feasibility study with them soon so we can decide if it is a good idea and if we should sell the beads to jewelry makers or make our own jewelry. I experimented with making them yesterday and they turned out really well for a first try. They are all made out of people magazine pages or handouts from IST that I colored with crayon and cut u. 

Paper Cooking Briquettes: This is more down the line, but I hope that the bead project will help show the women the value of recycling and then we can move on to the more involved paper cooking briquettes. Using recycled paper and peanut shells, you can create these dense logs that can be used for cooking. This alternative fuel source will clean up the streets, but also help slow down deforestation. It also burns cleaner than the plastic bags people use to get their wood or “coal” fires started.

Teaching English: I’ll be teaching it at my organization, but also hope to give a class to students in my neighborhood. I go back and forth on how I feel about teaching English. I think I have landed on the pro side for 2 main reasons. Rio Tinto is starting a big mining project in the area and will only hire people who can speak English so I will be helping people get jobs and helping the Rio Tinto jobs remain in the community. I also will have a group of young men and women who I can sensibilize on making positive life choices.

Teaching Youth Entrepreneurship: Right on the back of IST, we had a training on a new Youth Entrepreneurship Program we are rolling out in Guinea. One of our response volunteers was here to develop it and he trained 17 volunteers and more than 17 Guineans on how to teach the program. I am going to start teaching it at our youth center with the director if the youth center this summer. I hope to start teaching it as a university

course at the agricultural university come fall. With unemployment at around 70% for recent college grads, it is crucially important to give business skills to these students who will be forced to become entrepreneurs out of necessity.

Did you know this is how cashews grow? Me neither. 

Youth Professional Development / Income Generating Activity for CECOJE:

In Guinea, there is a structure called CECOJE (Centre d’Ecoute et Conseil de La Jeunesse). It’s found in every major town and is a kind of youth center run by volunteers. Their main goal is to use peer education to prevent AIDS and promote family planning. This is the organization we partnered with in Kindia to do the Youth Employability Workshop. I hope to transform this 3 day extravaganza into a semester of classes. Peer educators from the CECOJE will hopefully be able to teach it after some training, and participants will pay for the class generating some income for the CECOJE.

Numeracy Murals: Women and girls spend hours and hours at the pump in Kindia. I hope to paint teaching murals focused on teaching numeracy on the cement walls that surround each pump so that the women can learn while they sit waiting for water. Got to take advantage of that captive audience.

Promoting Tourism: I am also going to work with a volunteer in the Fouta (mountain region of which I am on the border of) whose partner organization is the national office of tourism. Since you have to pass through Kindia to get to the Fouta, the goal is to have people stop here for a few days and visit the waterfalls and FABIK (see later post). Anyway, we will be writing a Peace Corps Guide to Guinea. I also will be working with FABIK to get their tourism operations up and running.

Kenede Savings and Loans Association: On the request of my host dad, I will be starting a VSLA in my neighborhood. VSLA’s are informal banks that take deposits and give out loans to members. It’s great because it was designed for illiterate groups and all the rules are designed by the members, including interest rate and repayment cycle. It is micro-finance for people who fall below the target group for MFI’s. Women who save with the group will actually make quite a bit off of the interest, since at the end of the cycle all money is shared out to the group and then you start again.

Outside of my framework, I will be visiting some of the public health volunteers to run workshops for their theater groups to help them up the quality of their health sensilibization skits. I did a brief 10 minute workshop with all the volunteers at IST and at least some of them weren’t weirded out by making a living sculpture depicting power…

That’s all for now. I am spending the next 10 days before leaving for Morocco to sow the seeds and hopefully by the time I get back, the ideas will have taken root.