Since my last post, I spent my time preparing for an All Volunteer Conference we held in Dakar, traveling to see other projects, and shooting instructional videos.
All Volunteer Conference
Our country director asked a group of about five third-year volunteers and me to organize a two-day conference for every Peace Corps Volunteer in Senegal. We also reached out to other West African Peace Corps countries and invited all of them to send as many representatives as they could. At the beginning of February, we had about 180 participants from six different countries. Sessions were offered throughout the day about best practices for twenty different types of peace corps activities. I gave a session titled "Approaches to Multimedia as a Tool for Counterpart and PCV Education," that had a pretty good turnout.
On the second day of the conference, we had an applied technology fair with volunteers explaining different types of machines that can be made with locally available materials to make life easier here (like a solar fruit drier made from oil barrels). Then we offered field demonstrations on urban gardening and agroforestry techniques, held a seminar on grant writing, and had a national meeting for our gender and development organization, SeneGAD.
I think the conference was a success, overall. I videotaped the whole thing, but haven't had a chance to put together a feature yet. For now, click here to see the page of our website with all the details: West Africa Peace Corps Volunteer Conference, Sharing Best Practices from the Field
Velingara Malaria Prevention Campaign
I also had the opportunity to do some traveling to observe and document mosquito net distributions in Saraya and Velingara (a department of Kolda). Let me back up...
Almost a year ago Ashtun Kutcher challenged CNN to a race to one million Twitter followers, and said that he would buy 10,000 mosquito nets if he won. The challenge spread, Oprah, P-Diddy and some others got involved, CNN matched the offer, and suddenly $500,000 was donated to Malaria No More. Peace Corps Senegal applied for some nets, citing our success in smaller scale distributions.
80,000 mosquito nets arrived in Senegal this winter, 7,000 headed to Saraya (the department I lived in) to finish the distribution we did there last summer and the remainder to Velingara, which is also in southern Senegal, to give the entire health district - 230,000 people - universal coverage.*
In January, Malaria No More's Chief Marketing Officer, Jeff Smith, the mosquito net company's marketing director, Lisa Goldman, and a professional photographer, Maggie Hallahan came to document the Saraya distribution. I was lucky enough to travel with them for about four days, helping them as a translator as they took their photos, and assisting Maggie as a producer in the field and logging all the photos she took afterward. To see a slideshow of some of the photos she took, look here: Malaria No More slide show.
To see the page on the Peace Corps Kedougou website about the Saraya distribution, click here.
In February, the PC/Senegal Country Director, Chris Hedrick, and I traveled to Velingara to document the first few days of the distribution there. Once completed, the Health District of Velingara will be the largest area in the world to have been provided universal mosquito net coverage. I put together a short video feature and, having recently been designated as the PC/Senegal webmaster, created a page about the distribution for our website: Velingara Malaria Prevention Campaign.
Given the scale of this distribution, it is receiving some international attention. Anderson Cooper 360's producer has been writing about it on his blog. Click here to read what he has to say about it: Lifesaving Tweets: Malaria nets distributed in Senegal
* Universal coverage means a net over every bed in a community. We work with local health relays to do a census of every household, counting the number of beds, and the number of mosquito nets already hanging. We use those numbers to calculate the need of each household and distribute accordingly.
Instructional Videos
While visiting an Agroforestry volunteer to show a visitor the work he had done, I videotaped his giving a brief description of how he pruned a particular species of tree into a live fence. I edited it into a short, 90-second tutorial with a low production value. The country director loved it and we've run with the idea.
Over the next year we hope to create as many instructional videos as possible (he says he wants 100). They will be short tutorials - maybe ten seconds to two minutes long - that demonstrate efficiently, without any frills, specific techniques and technologies.
The videos will be compressed and made into video podcasts for volunteers to take into the field with them on their iPods. They'll also be dubbed over in local languages. The idea is that before demonstrating something like composting, a volunteer can watch the instructional video in English to regain confidence on the topic, and then watch in a local language to secure his confidence in the necessary vocabulary. He can even show the local-language versions to his counterparts on his iPod if he needs to clear something up.
I plan to spend much of my time over the next putting as many of these together as I can. Here's an example of the pilot one I did.
No comments:
Post a Comment