Our camera broke!

Alright so our camera is broken, does that mean we can’t write? Well it kind of takes the fun out of it for you all. I’ll try to give you an idea of what we have been doing the past couple of months, which have actually been busy, without boring you to death with giant walls of text.

I believe that you all know that we began giving hygiene talks at the end of January in a new community. We work in the school with the kids and their parents. They are very participatory and the director of the school is very supportive of our work (she quizzes the kids and the moms and dads afterward!). Working there has been something that we really look forward to doing.

February was a whirlwind for us. In addition to the new community and other commitments that we had with the health center, we collaborated with the NGO (non-governmental organization) Water for People. For the last two to three years, they have been doing health education trainings with the teachers in selected schools and, in some of those schools, building hygienic installations like latrines, hand-washing stations, and water deposits. They plan to expand their work beyond the schools to work with entire communities, but first, they had to get an idea of the communities with the greatest need. Obviously every one of the nearly 70 communities could benefit from the work that they do, BUT you have to begin somewhere.

Click here to continue reading about Water for People

For those of you following the blog, you may remember that I started a small computer lab project working with Don Livingston from Computers for Guatemala, funded with donations from family and friends. My Health Center director, the program manager of “Healthy Adolescents”, and I went to go pick up the computers almost six months ago only to find that they did not have keyboards or mice. After a few months of scrounging around for supplies and going through my stuff back in the United States, we finally got the lab up and running. Unfortunately it didn’t get much use because we finished getting everything set up right as the school year was ending. The 2010 school year is scheduled to start in our area next Monday, so I plan on spending the majority of these last few months here serving as a lab monitor and instructor for all of the students that come in.

Images of the lab in the next week or so… stay tuned!

We recently had the chance to make it out to El Limón to finish documenting the final results of our USAID Small Project Assistance (SPA) Grant. Without further ado, here are the results.