August 2

Hello folks.  I know it's been a while.  Time has really been flying by.  I have a ton of pictures and stuff to upload, I'll get to it eventually.  But, I did want to give an update on my project so far.  

As many of you know, this trip was to be a twofold experience.  The first was to see if I had the gumption to do international work.  The second was to work with an organization and look at some of their disaster preparedness work within a community.

I think I have answered the first question.  I do have what it takes, but we'll see if there are any opportunities after graduation.  As to the second, it has changed and definitely for the better.  

My first few weeks were spent doing a lot of research into different government schemes (programs) (they call them schemes here).  I then moved into some data entry and analysis on a Community Based Monitoring (CBM) program that Unnati is working on.  It started from monitoring of disaster services, here that means drought.  But, Unnati quickly realized that in order to be effective in a disaster, the people needed services all year round and there was no one doing any sort of monitoring, especially community based monitoring of the different governmental schemes.  Many of the local villagers had no idea they were due any sort of services.  Many were taken advantage of through usury or discrimination or straight up theft by those that were supposed ot be looking out for them.

So, the CBM project was born.  It spans 3 Blocks and 50 villages.  Below is a flow chart of information that I created in a presentation I recently made.  Unnati works through facilitators who work through citizen's collectives to monitor and educate the village.  

Sound easy enough right?  Well, I forgot to mention, most of these villagers are illiterate and uneducated.  So, first a language had to be created.  In the screen shot below you will see the pictures that the village collectives came up with to mark down different things on a social map of the village.  They created this social map, by the way.  

 So, the end result is the data below, which is what I have been working with to finalize the surveys, collate data, create totals sheets, analyze the data, create action plans for the facilitators to take back to the collectives, etc.

The plan for this week is to finish up the monthly and 6monthly surveys and get those finalized.  Next week, I'll begin translating some of the feedback we've gotten from the facilitators and start working up questions for my in-depth field interviews of the collectives and villagers.  That's in the following week.

Okey dokey, time to get back to crunching numbers!  Till next time...