meet the youth

Youth Day at church

small success

We got our small committee back! Our first meeting is December 6th. My counterpart and I went to a project design workshop put on by the Peace Corps and together we wrote a nice proposal for the ecotourism project we want to start. So we'll present it at the meeting and see if we can make this happen. My vision is to use this small committee, consisting of representatives from all groups in the village (each family group, the women, youth, Turaga ni Koro, etc.), to start and then manage the ecotourism business together as a team. The money that we make would then go towards helping parents pay their children's school fees and maybe some other education promotion projects. But that's just my vision, and I know some other people share it with me, but some have different visions so our challenge will be to put all the visions together. But I'm happy that we've made this important step. That is starting the committee and setting the date for the first meeting. We'll see how it goes...

Bringing the Peace Corps into the 21st Century

I actually wrote this on Friday, November 21, 2008

This blog entry is going to be somewhat critical so I think I'm supposed to say something like: The views expressed here are my own and don't necessarily reflect the views of the United States Government, the Peace Corps, or anyone else you might blame. Ok, now that's out of the way.

I just received the latest issue of Worldview magazine (worldviewmagazine.com) which is the National Peace Corps Association's quarterly magazine. This issue was focused on what is wrong with the Peace Corps as an organization and what it could do to improve and become more effective in the future. It's heartening and frustrating at the same time to read the articles written by past volunteers and staff that served in countries all around the world and to hear that they've faced the exact same problems as I have, not with their country of service or the members of their community, but with the Peace Corps management and resources available to them. Everyone that submitted critical articles to the magazine agrees that the mission and goals of the Peace Corps are sound and it could and should be the most effective development organization in the world. But it's not and there are many reasons. I agree with most of the writers that call for change in management structure, policies, and training. But I feel that most of those things are out of my control so I'll leave them to the next president and the returned PCVs in congress that are currently pushing for change. But there was one thing that was mentioned in the magazine that I can directly relate and particularly frustrates me. We live in the 21^st century and as difficult as it may be for some people to believe, there is high speed internet on this tiny little piece of land in the middle of the pacific ocean. I see no reason why we as Peace Corps Fiji aren't taking advantage of it. The biggest problem I've faced with the Peace Corps and trying to start projects is just a lack of information. One person in the magazine wrote that it's as if each new volunteer has to re-invent the wheel, because there is surprising little information available to us about what past volunteers have done in our area and how they did it. For example, the two projects that I've started to focus on are getting a school house built for our kindergarten and starting a small eco-tourism business on the island. You'd think there would be plenty of information out there about those two projects since every village in Fiji either has a kindergarten or wants one, and tourism is now the largest industry in Fiji and business advising and good environmental stewardship are two of Peace Corps Fiji's goals. But I have not been able to get any information on past volunteers that have successfully or unsuccessfully worked on these two projects. All of us volunteers are required to report trimesterly on all projects we've worked on include organizations we've collaborated with and gotten funding from. So the office has all the information. It would be extremely valuable if they would then put that information into an online database that all current volunteers could access. I see no reason why this hasn't already been done. If there's some privacy/security/bureaucratic reason why this can't be done, I'm starting to think that we should just do it ourselves. Start a Peace Corps Fiji wiki that volunteers can use to share their project information. We wouldn't even have to start a new wiki, we could just develop the Fiji page of peacecorpswiki.org. But this might too much extra work since we all already have to compile all this information on our trimester reports, it'd be even more time (=money) spent at internet cafes. That's why I wish the office would just do it for us, but the wiki might be worth trying. All of you tech-minded people out there that read this blog, I'd appreciate any advice.

By the way, though actually somewhat relate to everything I've discussed, we just had the first volunteer in our group (FRE-6, remember the acronyms?) decide to go home or ET (early termination) and we're all very sad to see her leave though we all understand her reasons. So our group is down now to 30 I think. We lost one a few weeks ago to medical reasons (not lost as in he died but as in Washington headquarters told him he had to leave though he really wanted to stay). This is the longest any Peace Corps Fiji group as gone without someone ET-ing (actually, no group before even made it all the way to swearing-in). Even though this is quite an accomplishment (the staff credits themselves for the good training, we credit ourselves with just being too stubborn), it's still sad to see our friend leave and we'll all miss her.

Obama wins!

I'm pretty sure that every Peace Corps volunteer in Fiji is celebrating Barack Obama's win tonight. A group of us watched CNN on the satellite TV at one of the resorts. Someone should call him and let him know that Peace Corps Fiji voted for him.