So I don’t know how he does it but I swear if he escapes one more time I’m going to have to change his name to Houdini. Last week, after Marc helped me find a nice sturdy chain that Swarlz can’t bite through and a child’s belt that we fashioned into a dog collar, the stupid (or maybe really intelligent) dog somehow found a way to chew through his collar (it was made of leather so I guess that’s made it somewhat easy to tear through) and escape. However today was really a magic trick; since he tore through the dog collar, I have been forced to create a collar using the chain. I know it’s not very comfortable but so far metal seems to be the only substance that he can’t break through, or so I thought! This morning before leaving for Kaniamboua for the preliminary girl’s club meeting I fixed the chain around his neck (making sure he had enough room to breathe don’t worry!) and left. When I returned around noon, he had somehow managed to wrangle his way through the chain and now the chain was taut around his midsection. I’m really not sure how he did it but to make sure it didn’t happen again, I checked the chain and tied it around his neck once again. After returning from Sam’s peer educator training in Adjengre, I came home to find Swarley loose in the front yard with the chain all tangled up around the tree! I’m pretty sure he has not developed opposable thumbs in the past week so this leaves me with the only conclusion: my dog has magical powers, one of those powers apparently being the ability to apparate! I guess this means building a doggy fence is a futile idea…
Apart from my dog’s silly escapades, the girl’s club meeting went well this morning. I was really nervous about having to change the whole program around at the last second, without any warning to my homologues but there really wasn’t any other choice unless I wanted to change my name to “Yovo, the money-donating fool of Sotouboua”. After performing a brief opening ceremony with the girls, the village chief, the director of the school and some other “important” people in the Kaniamboua community, I pulled my counterparts aside to tell them what I had decided regarding my decision to withdraw some donations (per diem for the repos time, start-up money for the loan I had previously agreed to, etc.) for the club. Although I am sure they weren’t too happy to be told this at the last minute, there really wasn’t anyway around the situation. Aside from that, everything else went somewhat smoothly. We had a much greater turnout then expected and we ended up having to turn some girls away since we only had space to work with 20 girls. After going over some rules and expectations of the club and playing “train wreck” (an ice breaker), I got into the lesson part of the club, discussing the bridge model from the life skills book and how the model applied to the structure of the club (the bridge model is used to show how the various lessons in the life skills book such as decision-making skills and future planning skills can serve as the building blocks for a bridge towards positive behaviour change). Working with the girls was a very different experience than what I’m used to since the girls were really shy and it took a lot of energy to coax information out of them but thanks to the help of my counterparts who served as a translator from my “American” French to “Togolese” French, I was able to get through the lesson.
After a quick lunch, I headed up to Adjengre to watch Sam conduct the last part of his peer educator training and funny enough I arrived just in time to observe the part of the formation that was relevant to me. To finish off the training, Sam had invited Beatrice and Djeri, members of Espoir Vie Togo (E.V.T., an association of pris en charge located in Sokodé) to come and talk about HIV/AIDS associations. Beatrice is not only a psycho-social counselor for E.V.T. but she is also an openly infected member of EVT. Djeri, who lost his father to AIDS, was a member of the EVT OEV club (children infected with or affected by HIV). After talking to them briefly at the end of the training, they invited me up to Sokodé next weekend to check out the OEV club and the members meeting to see what I could bring back to help VST in Sotouboua. I’m excited to hopefully get some ideas on how to start an OEV club at Vie Saine with the potential help of the members of the health club at Intelligentsia.
Till next time,
-Nikhil
P.S. Props to Kim Rieck for sending me several copies of The Economist magazine. You are freaking amazing!
Apart from my dog’s silly escapades, the girl’s club meeting went well this morning. I was really nervous about having to change the whole program around at the last second, without any warning to my homologues but there really wasn’t any other choice unless I wanted to change my name to “Yovo, the money-donating fool of Sotouboua”. After performing a brief opening ceremony with the girls, the village chief, the director of the school and some other “important” people in the Kaniamboua community, I pulled my counterparts aside to tell them what I had decided regarding my decision to withdraw some donations (per diem for the repos time, start-up money for the loan I had previously agreed to, etc.) for the club. Although I am sure they weren’t too happy to be told this at the last minute, there really wasn’t anyway around the situation. Aside from that, everything else went somewhat smoothly. We had a much greater turnout then expected and we ended up having to turn some girls away since we only had space to work with 20 girls. After going over some rules and expectations of the club and playing “train wreck” (an ice breaker), I got into the lesson part of the club, discussing the bridge model from the life skills book and how the model applied to the structure of the club (the bridge model is used to show how the various lessons in the life skills book such as decision-making skills and future planning skills can serve as the building blocks for a bridge towards positive behaviour change). Working with the girls was a very different experience than what I’m used to since the girls were really shy and it took a lot of energy to coax information out of them but thanks to the help of my counterparts who served as a translator from my “American” French to “Togolese” French, I was able to get through the lesson.
After a quick lunch, I headed up to Adjengre to watch Sam conduct the last part of his peer educator training and funny enough I arrived just in time to observe the part of the formation that was relevant to me. To finish off the training, Sam had invited Beatrice and Djeri, members of Espoir Vie Togo (E.V.T., an association of pris en charge located in Sokodé) to come and talk about HIV/AIDS associations. Beatrice is not only a psycho-social counselor for E.V.T. but she is also an openly infected member of EVT. Djeri, who lost his father to AIDS, was a member of the EVT OEV club (children infected with or affected by HIV). After talking to them briefly at the end of the training, they invited me up to Sokodé next weekend to check out the OEV club and the members meeting to see what I could bring back to help VST in Sotouboua. I’m excited to hopefully get some ideas on how to start an OEV club at Vie Saine with the potential help of the members of the health club at Intelligentsia.
Till next time,
-Nikhil
P.S. Props to Kim Rieck for sending me several copies of The Economist magazine. You are freaking amazing!
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