December blues

December has actually been a pretty busy month for me here, which is why I haven't updated so much since Thanksgiving . . .

In addition to IST (which was a really long week away from my town), things have really started to pick up on the work fronts. At my office we have finally started to have focus group discussions with the community- we will have more than 40 meetings before February in order to get ideas from the community on priorities for projects. This will all end with a big meeting in which we will hammer out a project plan for the next three years based on what we have been told in these community meetings. We are meeting with kids and adults and some of their responses are great. I love it when the kids in the villages start talking about people respecting their rights and living in a clean village after 5 or 10 years. I think that they have a good idea of where they want to be in the future, but maybe not how to get there. One of the biggest challenges with coming in to these communities is that there is often still the mentality that "someone else" (governement, the US, NGOs, everyone else) is responsible for change. This is really hard when you are coming in with an organization like World Vision- there are big expecations for everything to get better right away. I'm a little bit afraid that anything we do will not be enough (because there is so many things) because people will say "why didn't YOU do this, this, this and this!"

Other than that, I've been working with 8 girls on getting ready for a Model United Nations conference coming up in February. We are Burkina Faso (which if you don't know is a small, really poor country in West Africa). I'm pretty sure that none of these girls had ever heard of BF before (I had to look it up on a map). Additionally, they have very little experiance doing internet research, have never heard of Robert's Rules of Order and are scared to speak in front of people. But we are getting along slowly, slowly.

This week, I'm going to travel down to Gjirokaster to spend Christmas with my friends Chris and Courtney and some other Southern volunteers. This will be my first trip down to the South and I'm really excited. I'm not excited about the 12-14 hours that I will have to spend on the road to get down there . . .

Anyway, I hope that your holiday season is full of friends, family, light and love!

See you next year!