Quick and Dirty since it's been a while

In my last post I had submitted an extension proposal and was awaiting an official decision from Headquarters while meanwhile going about the rest of my life as a regular teacher and PCV finishing up his 2 years of service.

There's a couple better posts forthcoming, but since that was about 4 months ago, a bit has happened since then.  Actually, more than a bit, quite a lot more.  Hence the radio silence here on Embarkations.  So I thought the quickest way to dispatch with the news would be a quick and dirty list.  In bullet form.

The context:  In March, we hosted the Simulation Games Development Conference, we launched Public Achievement with the training conference, and on March 28 I officially submitted my PCVL and extension proposal.  Since then, it's kind of been a blur.

• April
• Early April: Our SPA Project "To Teach with Care" is approved to build school technology and interactive teaching capacity
• Mid-April: PCVL Transition Team Meetings begin for Health Education (HE) Program (basically, moving things from the previous PCVL to me)
• April 18 - 21: Bill and I manage a vacation to Kiev over Easter break
• Focus In/Train Up (Peace Corps-wide initiative) revision of HE Program begins in earnest
• May
• May 3: Program Manager and Director for Programming and Training visit Carahasani for a site identification meeting to determine if a follow on volunteer should be placed there after me; this is also my first time in one of these meetings (something I'll be doing more of as a PCVL)
• May 4-5: Site visit to Susan Adams' site for her Hygiene Campaign (we want to develop new training materials based upon her campaign in order to encourage this model in the future)
• May 7: Simulation Game Project Meeting, then back to site
• May 9 - 11: Back to Chisinau for Close of Service (COS) Conference for M25 Volunteers and M24 Extendees
• May 12: Haiducii Training for our newest members
• May 14: Another Simulation Game Project Meeting, then back to site again
• Ongoing: medical clearance for year 3 tests and appointments
• May 19: Final HE Partner Conference
• May 20: Planning for M27s' Pre-Service Training (PST) begins
• May 21: Bill's bday in the village (my host mom wanted him to have a Moldovan birthday)
• May 23 - 26: Bill and I attend a conference sponsored by a Romania Fulbrighter and RPCV on Public Health and Social Services in Romania
• May 28: Medically cleared!
• May 29-30: Last days of class, last days as a teacher
• May 31: Last Bell, the school does not realize I am leaving but does ask me for a toast at the celebration afterwards
• May 31 (evening): I look at my June calendar and realize that when I leave for Chisinau the next morning, it is effectively for good.  Packing and purging begins...
• June
• June 1: To Chisinau; may days of PST planning meetings ensue
• June 4: Susan Adams and her husband Curt become the first of our group to COS (i.e., leave), Matt Mockerman will follow suit later that month, as will MacKenzie (the M24 Healthie who was our program's previous PCVL)
• June 6: Comments back from Headquarters asking for clarification on our PCVL work assignments (not the easy process we were looking for)
• June 7: The M27s arrive!  (more commonly known as the "newbies" or, more bureaucratically, the "trainees")
• June 7: I opt instead for a monitoring and evaluation trip out to 2 Public Achievement groups on the borderlands with Transnistrea (the newbies will see plenty of me soon enough)
• June 8: Bill's going-away BBQ
• June 11: Health Education technical sessions ("tech") for PST begin; my personal life ends
• June 11-15: First week of PST
• June 14: Elvira (the HE Program Manager) has an accident and suffers a severe contusion to her foot, effectively taking her out of the first 5 weeks of PST and complicating things for everyone a bit
• June 15: Lease ends on Bill's house (earlier than expected) and 2 months of vagabondage begin 
• June 16: Final Public Achievement Conference
• June 18 - 22: Second week of PST
• June 23-25: Two sacred nights back in the village
• June 26: Bill and I leave for vacation!  Desperately needed.
• June 26 - July 8: A great 2 week romp begins that takes us to Bosnia and Herzegovina for the Annual HIA Conference and a week in Italy with Jess and her fam
• July 8: I return to Moldova but Bill heads off to Poland
• July
• July 9: Back to the grind, while luckily the trainees are on visit to their future site and it gives me a couple days to catch up
• Also, the Stenbergs (Heath and Leigh) COS, marking the full start of COS season and a constant string of goodbyes to the volunteers I've served with for 2 years
• July 13: One treasured night back in the village, it will be the only one this month
• July 14: Opening of a SPA-funded basketball court outside Chisinau
• July 17-18: Trainees conduct micro-lessons, their first time teaching in Romanian
• July 19: We finally simulate the simulation game designed as a Peace Corps training tool!
• July 22: A day off.  Strange.
• July 25: Lindsay Wing, my best friend of the past 2 years COSes.  F@!#.
• July 27: Final Practice School prep time with Trainees; first Practice School tears
• Sometime in July: apartment search
• August
• July 30 - August 4: Practice School Week 1, more tears ensue
• Bill gets back
• August 6 - 11: Practice School Week 2, slightly fewer tears
• August 10: Moving day!  (Finally get to move into a permanent home)
• Aug. 15: Trainees swear in and become Volunteers!  Immediately leave for their new sites.  They're a great group, pretty well prepared, and we didn't lose a single one from the Health Program.
• Exhale sigh of relief.  
• Aug. 20: Facilitate Haiducii for a summer camp
• Aug. 21: PCVL training (better late than never)
• Aug. 26 - 29: In the village (now officially my former site) for 4 days of facilitating technology seminars
• Aug. 30: Technology training for another volunteer's school (luckily close to Chisinau that it was a day-trip)

And that pretty much brings us to today.  Cheers!

SPA – what is it, really?

Below is a description on Peace Corps Moldova's Small Project Assistance (SPA) fund, which our review board put together early this fall to clarify the purpose of the program for the new group of volunteers.  The background to this post can be found here.  We've recently undergone a pretty thorough review of our SPA program, refocusing on the overriding goals and tweaking some of our policies to match that.  If there are any readers out there who work on their country's SPA program - or a similar program for that matter - I'm curious to hear thoughts on this.

SPA – what is it, really?
SPA exists through a special inter-agency agreement with USAID (plain English: it’s their money, we just get to spend/administer it). As such, the program is unique in that its goal furthers both USAID and Peace Corps’ missions (plain English: we can’t do whatever we want with the $). SPA has one overriding program imperative: "to increase the capabilities of local communities to conduct low-cost, grassroots sustainable development." This objective is significantly different from a goal of simply “conducting sustainable development.” It also informs the only success indicator against which we report: # of HCNs who demonstrate new capacity to guide a project through the complete PDM cycle as a result of collaborating in a SPA project.

The reason that USAID funds PC projects through the SPA program as a part of the Participating Agency Program Agreement (2009) is to teach HCNs all stages of the PDM cycle, including proposal writing, as a form of community capacity building. The focus of the program is not to fund volunteers' community projects or to teach volunteers about project design and management (though it has these positive effects).

USAID considers giving this money to Peace Corps an efficient use of funds because we have long-term, deep relationships with partners whom we can guide through the PDM cycle step by step. It's not so much that we know any better what communities' needs are, but that the process of working very closely and intensively with a project from start to finish is one of the best ways to teach these skills. In short, the project itself is of significantly less importance to USAID than the skills partners develop that can be applied in future community project work. We might not always agree with this sentiment when considering a potential project. With any other program goal, however, USAID would feel better qualified to implement the project itself. As a rule of thumb, the best projects come from the space where donor and implementer goals overlap, but this also requires the honesty to be able to walk away from projects sometimes. SPA is no exception, though we are fortunate in having a very broad donor goal.

On a deeper level, this program design speaks to Peace Corps’ broader philosophy of sustainability. We are not here simply to do, but instead to teach through collaboration with others. In the classroom, we don’t just teach students, but teachers as well. With mayors, we help to teach technology, not simply type documents. The idea of sustainability is no different with any other community project, even when it includes outside funding.

Sometimes this fact is mind-numbingly frustrating – it’s a much higher bar, so high that few organizations engage in the process on the level we do. This level of support is inconceivable for USAID (or any big development organization). But this is also the brilliance of the program: it plays to Peace Corps’ unique strengths in the development field as well as each of our unique relationships that are built on mutual trust and collaboration. Thus, this same difficulty is also the unique value of SPA – in all the grant making development programs our committee members have examined, there is nothing else like SPA out there. And it’s also one of the reasons we have so much respect for all of you.

What is Capacity Building, and what is Capacity Building Through Education
Business English.com defines "capacity building" as "planned development of (or increase in) knowledge, output rate, management, skills, and other capabilities of an organization through acquisition, incentives, technology, and/or training." In easier terms, capacity building means increasing the organization's ability to do what it does, to fulfill its mission and its goals. For the SPA program, projects must include two forms of capacity building: 1) the aforementioned increase in project design and management skills, and 2) a capacity building element through education (classes or trainings).

Here's example of how this might look: If your project sets out to bring running water to the school in order to improve students' health and to decrease the number of absences, the project may also do something like conduct health classes on the threats of infectious diseases -- or maybe conduct a hand washing campaign to decrease illness and a civic engagement campaign about taking care of "our" school so students will keep the indoor bathrooms clean. These training are matched with the goals of the project. For the trainings to increase the capacity of the school, they should not only be conducted by the PCV, but they should be conducted with a one or more HCN who will be able to conduct such classes themselves later on. In this way, the project uses education to increase the capacity of the organization, and in so doing, increases the sustainability of the intervention as well as the likelihood of meeting project objectives.

SPA - Peace Corps' Small Project Assistance Fund

Many friends and family back home by this point have heard me talk about SPA, a USAID grant-making mechanism for Peace Corps Volunteers and one of my more time-consuming secondary activities.  As with almost all PC programming, posts administer their SPA programs separately.  I've been serving on Peace Corps Moldova's SPA review board since last winter, meaning once a month during the winter-spring funding cycle I get a stack of 8-16 grants to examine before travelling to the capital for a day of reviewing which will get funded.  Our total annual budget is $140,000 with the maximum grant being $5,000.  The money comes from US Agency for International Development, but can only be used to fund community-led projects that are conducted in collaboration with a volunteer.

Obviously, there's a lot of paperwork and minutia in reviewing grants, but it has nevertheless been one of my favorite secondary activities during my time here.  It's given me a chance to see the incredible breadth of initiatives volunteers support, from community youth radio stations to agricultural projects.  It's also proven true the maxim that the best way to truly learn something is to teach others - helping fellow volunteers through the grant process and continuously teaching the steps of project design and management has been great practice for explaining these steps to my own community partners.

As I spend more time around development organizations, however, I've also been gaining a deeper appreciation for the SPA program and the several ways in which it is unique.  Simply put, there is no other development program like it out there.  Because the overriding goal of the program is to teach project design and management skills, as compared to most grant-making programs which focus on particular priorities, with SPA there is no restriction on project domain.  We've funded initiatives running the gamut from democratization and technology to health and business development.

We just held our first meeting this weekend, and as always, I was impressed by the creative, sustainable, low-cost and community-led solutions volunteers collaborated with community partners to design.  I learned about rocket-mass heaters and the first school for the deaf and blind in Moldova, saw the most innovative reading promotion program that's probably ever been done in Moldova, and even got to see a high school student student give a very professional presentation to a committee of adults and foreigners.

The present entry here is meant for readers back home as a background companion post to this piece, which takes much of this information for granted.  But it's also an insight onto how I spent upwards of 25 hours this past week.  Seeing the great proposals we started the year off with yesterday, it was all worth it.

Secondary Projects

In PC lingo, a “secondary project” is any project that falls outside of one’s primary program goals and partnerships.  In my case, that would be anything outside of the health education domain.

Most, if not all, PCVs worldwide have secondary projects.  For many, in fact, secondary projects often become primary projects, if not formally at least in the amount of time they take up.  There are a number of reasons for this.  First, it’s often unclear where a program ends and a secondary project begins.  At my site, for example, my work at the mayor’s office and the soup kitchen are both outside of the primary assignments at the school and health center that the HESC program manager set up for me.  But both include a significant health promotion component.  So is it primary, or secondary?

Second, the very nature of long-term intensive grassroots work in rural communities is such that the partnerships Peace Corps arranges for a PCV before they get there are often not the most fruitful collaborations.  Sometimes the organization doesn’t have two years of work, sometimes the local counterpart didn’t fully understand that a PCV normally means more work, or sometimes everybody just agrees there’s a different local organization the PCV can better help.  Peace Corps understands this, and it’s one of the reasons the organization is flexible and encourages secondary projects as a way to find the best uses for one’s time.

Finally, contrary to popular opinion, PCVs are human beings, and few human beings find total life fulfillment in their work life.  It just so happens that PC is so all-life encompassing that just about any non-work non-familial social activity is likely to be a secondary project, whether it’s playing basketball with community members or playing with kids at the pre-school.

There are two main categories of secondary activities: the kind one does at site, and the country wide Peace Corps activities.  Posts tend to have a number of these activities, which are run by volunteers and tend to focus on key national level development priorities.

Besides working at the soup kitchen and mayor’s office, I’ve also been working on a number of the country wide initiatives.  It’s fun to work with other volunteers, as it so often seems much more straightforward and there’s no language barrier.  At this level, my main secondary activities have been the Gender Workgroup (GWG), the Small Project Assistance Program (SPA), Girls Leading Our World (GLOW), and Haiducii.