Thursday, August 27, 2009

More Alphabet Soup

Last week I went to a Project Design and Management workshop (aka PDM), which was conveniently held at a hotel on the beach not far from my site. We spent basically three full days discussing development, approaches to participatory community development (that is, getting the community involved as much as possible), and the steps of designing and managing a community-based project. The workshop is open to pretty much all volunteers in Nicaragua so we were a mixed bag of volunteers from all five sectors: agriculture, small business, health, environment, and English. The volunteers came from regions all over Nicaragua and everyone brought a Nicaraguan counterpart so I had the opportunity to meet some new and interesting people.

As my counterpart I brought Rafael, who manages the NGO where I teach English. They do a lot of projects in the rural areas outside of town so he came in with a lot of knowledge but he said he learned something so that’s good.

Here we are in our little work group with an environment volunteer and her counterpart who are working on building a bigger library in their town:


And here’s some of our work, PC-Nicaragua is probably the country’s biggest consumer of papelografo which are the big sheets of paper you see here. We basically wallpapered the room we were working in:


Although we did work our tails off, we also had some fun. The last night we had a bonfire on the beach and the hotel staff roped a bunch of us into doing a goofy competition. For being good sports (my partner Colin and I came in 3rd out of 4 teams), we were awarded these fancy shell necklaces:



But my favorite part was at the end each group had to present a creative review of the steps we learned. All the groups presented some fantastic and very creative summaries. My group did a fashion show, I put my Spanish to the test as the announcer while my group members strutted their stuff:

Stephanie showing El Sombrero de Visión (The Vision Hat)


Rafael in La Faja de Plan de Acción and Las Botas de Presupuesto (The Action Plan Belt & Budget Boots)


Go Team Mafael del Sillo (we named our team by combining the names of our two sites)!

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