Wednesday, April 7, 2010

What the hell am I doing here?

So after nearly six months at site I figure it's probably a good idea to tell you what I'm actually doing here.

I'm assigned to a child development center attached to a Full Gospel Church. My site (hereafter known as "the project") is a Compassion International project. Compassion International, in case you didn't know or didn't want to click the link, is a child sponsorship program. They work internationally in many different countries pairing individuals, families and groups up with children in need. Compassion gives sponsored children school fees and birthday and Christmas gifts. Throughout the year sponsors may also decide to donate "family gifts" to children and their families. Compassion has really helped out many of our children and their sponsors have been great sending pictures, stickers, cards and "family gifts." We have a couple of the older youths who support themselves due to their parents dying and have been able to build houses for their siblings and themselves through Compassion's and their sponsor's support.

So a few pictures:


This is where I do some of my filing (in the next photo you can see the other filing cabinets where I do the rest of my filing). Since my counterpart left at the beginning of April, I'm now in charge of the children's folders, which basically just means updating them with school term reports, health reports, etc.


This is a good view of the desk I sit at (when I'm not filing). The little notebooks on top of the filing cabinets are what the children use to draft letters to their sponsors. They write four letters a year.


Well that's about it...

Oh! I almost forgot! I also "teach" several of the people at my organization computer-related stuff (I'm not a very good computer teacher). Right now we're trying to get the basics of doing math in excel. I've "taught" them adding, subtraction, multiplication and division. I attempted percentages, but yeah...fail. So in a couple weeks we're going to attempt percentages again. I'm also going to type up some exercises they can do to practice if they really want to.

The end.