paca paca paca

October 28, 2010

All parts of our PACA are finally finished, and the biggest thing is we learned from it.

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned anything about the whole thing so I’m just going to state everything again.

Step one: We looked at the school and talked with the principal trying to get a feel for what she thought was needed. Went back to our class and started to develop some plans. Through our PACA criteria we came up with some things we really liked. Number one being a manual labor projects that was at the same time a sort of English camp for students. It involved teaching students some English terms, having them use critical thinking skills to develop a plan of attack, getting those empty rooms cleaned, and then having the kids see if what they did was what they wanted to do. We wrote it up all nice like and showed it to the principal.

Step two: The principal didn’t like it. We mentioned our other idea to do just an English camp for the students. Not liking that either. Digging deeper into our suggestions, an English workshop for the teachers. She said she would work on the most important English skills she would want us to attack. We’d work in teams and take two topics. Well when we went to get her ideas she had a completely different idea.

Step three: The completely different idea was to fix a fence. A fence that needs to just be torn down and rebuilt. We don’t have the budget for that. So we went to the drawing board and figured out how to fix it the best within our budget, skills, and time.

Step four: Fixing the fence. We woke up early Tuesday morning to buy our supplies then went to work. We tore down the bad sections and put up new fence sections. We cut out the bad spots and either put in new fencing or wired it closed a bit better, tore down the first sections (the ones you see first) and replaced them, and tore out the worse section and left it. No fence looks better than shaudy fence, right? We did this all with 4 pairs of cheap pliers (don’t have high expectations if you are going to pay 50 pesos for the tool), 5 PCTs, a dozen or more kids at any given time, and heat and humidity. But we busted it out and got the whole thing done in one morning, and even had time to shower before lunch.

Step five: Showing the fence to the principal.

Lessons learned: Thank goodness we won’t have a week to plan our community projects and then a week to do it. My first 3 months at site will be the evaluating, observing, asking, finding out what the schools needs are. Then the next 21 months will be doing (this is where you guys will come in).

Sometimes what you think the school needs or wants is not what the school wants or needs.

Our project is pretty not sustainable. That is the exact opposite of the point of Peace Corps. That happens though. Luckily, again, I’ll have plenty of time to make sure I am doing the right thing at my site.