Rain & Professional Development

Rainy season has come on full force.  Although it's not as bad as last year, it still does mean that I'm living in a swamp with the daily threat of my feet flying out in front of me and my rump landing hard in a giant squishy mix of animal crap, mud, and water.  My host sister left her tiny little butt print in the side of our hill the other day and I have not been anxious to repeat that artistic endeavor.  What adds insult to injury (there's been a lot of that happening lately), we have been going weeks without water...which doesn't make any sense because there is so much falling from the sky.  We collect the rain water in big dirty buckets (yay!) but we seem to always run out anyway...and then when we're eating things like soup for dinner, I get nervous about where that water came from.  I'm pretty sure it's from a spring we have halfway down the hill from my house, but I have been to that spring, and aside from the fact that they tie their cows up nearby to chew grass and poop everywhere, there are so many things swimming around and growing in that spring, I don't even want to wash my laundry with that water.  Oh Peru.

Aside from being water logged on a daily basis, I'm incredibly busy.  It's a great thing, because I'm busy, I'm getting a lot done, and I can feel good about that.  It's a bad thing now because on days where I wake up and the sky outside is falling...I still have to get out from under my down comforter and go out and hike around in that mess.  Staying dry is an art form.  Seriously.

On the 16th of February, I had a meeting with all of the health post workers in charge of health promotion from my class of health post to teach them how to use Pasos Adelante, the manual and sex ed program that I used last year to train high school kids in Cabracancha to be youth peer promoters. This year, the RED, which is essentially in charge of health promotion in the entire district, has made Pasos Adelante one of its goals, meaning that all the health posts need to try to do it in their sites.  Karen, the OB I've been working with in Cabracancha, helped me give a presentation to all these workers about classroom management, our experiences with the manual and the program, how to use the manual, the first steps for forming a group, working with the municipality & RED/DISA, etc.  Karen, in classic peruvian style, had prepared a powerpoint, but there was no projector...so we sat around for an hour and a half waiting for one.  We had fun with the presentation and I think people learned a lot.  I'm really excited about getting Pasos Adelante out there, because there is no sexual education for these kids, and they need it...especially in a machismo society.  Here are some photos from that day.

Here we're doing a fun activity at the beginning to set the tone for a NOT
super boring charla

I'm reviewing what we'll be talking about
during the session.

 

We played HIV/AIDS Jeopardy at the end, and they were harder to control
than my adolescents. I had to threaten point deduction every 30 seconds.

Here I'm talking about the first steps for forming
the group. 

Explaining how to play Jeopardy.  They can't say that
word at all, which makes me giggle. 

I think someone was trying to get away with a terrible
answer to one of the questions and I wasn't having it...hahah

They really were harder to control than a group of 12 adolescents, which gave me a good opportunity to show them how to manage a class of adolescents - with humor, not with authority or strictness or impatience.  I think they got the drift.  

I was really excited for the opportunity to teach them because I think that it was a really blatant example of professional development that I offered them and I don't always get that opportunity.  I've tried something along the same lines with the teachers at the primary school in Iraca, teaching them how to give educational sessions on health topics to their kids, showing them exactly how to do it, but they don't get into it.  They don't try it themselves.  I'm going to try and come at it from a different angle with them this year, but I'm glad I got to introduce these health post workers to Pasos Adelante, with my own success story so they know it is possible and doable.  

More to come later!