Hey all! Just thought I would give you all a bit of an update about the happenings here in Turkmenistan. Last week was an interesting week because I had a week long conference in Ashgabat all about community development and grant writing. It was a very interesting conference and basically covered everything I learned about community development in college. Needing community support and working with community and whatnot. The interesting and stressful portion of the conference was trying to explain that concept to my turkmen counterpart. It was interesting because this concept is completely foreign to Turkmen. It was crazy frustrating though because he was just focused on one thing throughout the whole conference: getting money to buy a resource room for the school. I kept trying to tell him that we need to evaluate what our community needs and get community support for a project that our village needs. I also kept trying to stress the idea of sustainibility to him: that is something that will continue on after I leave. I had a fear during the conference that building a resource room for the school would not be helpful to them because I doubt that the teachers would use the materials after I left. So I just kind of let the conference go by and let my counterpart learn what he could and I took new skills away from it too.
The interesting thing was that after the conference when I went back to school and talked to my counterpart about the conference he actually siad to me “You know what I have been thinking about our project for the past few days and you know what I am not sure that we would really use a room after you left and honestly I don’t really want to go through all of the hassel that it takes to get something that might not be used. Let’s try to look at doing something that our school could actually use and will use after you leave.” I was so floored and happy that he said that and that he came up with that on his own. So now we are looking at doing some community assessments to see what our school could use which is exciting because I am actually using some of my social work skills. Just today in fact I had my english club with my girls and talked with them about what they think our school could use. They came up with the ideas of improved toilets and a net for our volleyball court and a volleyball (so we can actually play volleyball). So it was cool to see what my kids are thinking about. Next I am off to see what my other teachers think we could use. Either way I’m excited to use the new assessments I learned from Peace Corps. Either way interesting stuff is going to happen!
