i was super lucky last weekend to have my birthday at the beach!! i was much more than counting my blessings to have my bday on a saturday - it was my friend Francine's bday on the wednesday before so we had a little party at her house with our Peace Ed class and some bday cake... but that was after the SIX hours of class we had that day!! i think i got my wish for a fabulous birthday - julianne and i with her parents that came to visit for the weekend took a little trip out to the caribbean coast away from homework and thesis writing... here are some highlights of tropical goodness!
"the wonderful rainforest!" :)
beachykeen goodness!
monkeys at the beach!!
i've never been so close to a live monkey not in a zoo!
and then for some snorkeling!! (but with some dancing in our snorkel gear first!)
julianne's ONWARD HO! with her giant duck feet!
underwater world!!
(i wish you could see some of the fish in the pictures!)
it's not a bday without a cake! chocolate bday cake on the road (cuz i ate so much delicious pasta on my bday night i couldn't eat my cake til the next day)! :) mmmm and bday pina coladas too!!
24!! :D
so that's it!! a little bday break, and indeeeeed beautiful start to a new year of being twenty four! school has continued to be intense and a little stressful & exhausting sometimes, but this semester is just zipping by! my friends ashley and jess will be coming in a week for easter break and my family's coming at the end of june for vacation/ graduation! i can't wait to share costa rica with them! :D
anyways, hope you are all doing well! til next time...
aside from the four friendly neighbourhood cats and couple of dogs that love to wander our home and property, our lovely casita (little house) is home to quite a few other creatures... mostly creepy crawly ones.
giant killer ants! ... eck! extra incentive to try to keep the kitchen spotless!
crickets to sing us to sleep... sometimes hoppy ones - Ross (our neighbour)'s cat Sylvia and her little toad friend.
and reptiley ones... just little ones though, phew! gecko in our garden!
here he is in our living room, pre-getting swept into a dustpan and swung into the garden
guess what's behind him under the tin can with a heavy bowl on top...?
SCORPION!!!!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAH!! we were warned about these!! our neighbours found this one in the house and got it in a jar. yeeeeeks! we were counting ourselves lucky til i looked down one day doing my homework and saw it and ran and grabbed the first thing i could find to cup him in... and then left him for 3 days cuz we didn't know what to do... and then last night i turned out all the lights after finishing my homework and accidentally kicked the can over on my way back to my room in the dark!! i shrieked and screamed (waking julianne up, who laughed at me in the morning!) and ran for the kitchen and groped madly for the lights and to my relief, found the scorpion still beside the can. i covered him back up and went to bed. :)
hello amigos! i know i've been quite MIA on my blog the last few weeks, minus the little bit about my new home (which i continue to love and be amazingly thankful for!).... but with good reason! i've been working hard on my thesis the last few weeks because our last visiting professor is the one who's advising my thesis so i've had to be doubly ambitious the last few weeks to do my course work and get as much thesis re-proposing, planning & organizing done together as possible while he was here, so it's been both frustrating and draining but incredibly awesome and exciting!
first of all, let me introduce my adviser - Dr. Thomas Mark Turay, from Sierra Leone, who just taught our course in Education for Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding... here's our class on his birthday with a little surprise celebration! :)
his course was really good - maybe not even so much the formal content of it, but just from who he is as a very inspiring embodiment of peace! here's a very brief background of his story (well, one of a continually unfolding story of his work as a peacemaker!). you can read the full version of the amazing story from his own words here! "[Dr. Turay] intended to complete the chapter within a couple of months while he gathered background material for a doctoral dissertation and conducted peacebuilding workshops on behalf of a Canadian NGO. His plans were changed dramatically by the January 1999 rebel invasion of Freetown. Trapped for several weeks, Turay then stayed longer until he could make contact with his three daughters—the eldest eighteen and twins aged sixteen—trapped behind rebel lines. In order to raise the money needed to bribe rebel fighters at the many checkpoints between Freetown and Makeni, he took short-term capacity building assignments with a variety of Sierra Leonean NGOs. The ironies trip over each other: aiming to write about capacity building, Turay became a practitioner. Planning to study international humanitarian agencies, he represented one himself until the invasion occurred, when he suddenly became "a local." Studying war, he became its victim. Desperate to find his daughters, and a witness to murder, his belief in peace was put to tests that nobody should endure.
Because of the way events unfolded, it was decided that he should scrap the outline he started with, and, instead, tell the story of his year in Sierra Leone in the first person. The fundamental theme of the book— building local capacities in a complex emergency—emerges in some ways much more clearly than it would have if the chapter had been written as originally intended. We believe that the convictions Turay articulates about the difficulties of capacity building amid collapsing structures and communities has special relevance and urgency."
i really feel privileged to have someone so experienced, knowledgeable and personally & humbly committed to peacebuilding be advising my thesis. he mentioned in class that when he is living in Sierra Leone (as he is now, long term), he makes a point of never sleeping in the cities in nice houses to show in practice that he isn't over and above his fellow rural folks just because he has a doctorate! i love it! and he just has a WEALTH of practical experience & knowledge of what i'm looking into too! in our first meeting together, when i was sharing with him about my research and deciding if i wanted him to be my adviser, i asked if he might know anyone in his Sierra Leone context doing literacy and peacebuilding that might be interested in my research and he just smiled and said, "well, you are looking at the director of an NGO for literacy in Sierra Leone". "oh... i see! all right then!" :)
sooo... my thesis is about peace education through literacy learning programs (programs for learning how to read and write, most basically). there is a big international push towards literacy these days, as a human right and as enabling for many other goals in development. we are actually a little over halfway into the "United Nations Literacy Decade" from 2003-2012.
my research will be focused on Sierra Leone which is home to about 6 million people in West Africa, and that had a very brutal 11 year civil war that just ended very recently, in 2002. it is a country extraordinarily rich in natural resources, but extremely poor due to well, many things, including bad governance and the war. it ranks 177th / 177 on the United Nations Human Development Index. it's the country where the movie Blood Diamond (mined diamonds whose profits fuel war) was set in.
anyways, my research is going to be looking particularly at the work of an organization called the Sierra Leone Adult Education Association, which is already doing some work in Sierra Leone around peacebuilding in its literacy programs - seeing out what they are doing, what literacy means for them, and how they can frame their programs even more towards effective peacebuilding. here's my proposal for the full wordy version of the description. :) basically, i'll be looking at a lot of what's written about literacy and peacebuilding already, and also doing some phone interviews with the director of SLADEA and program facilitators and participants - lucky for me, Dr. Turay is very connected with the peacebuilding community in Sierra Leone - the director of SLADEA was once a student of his, the umbrella organization that gave me consent for my research is a good friend, and some other names I've run into in the field and emailed turned out to also be good friends! :)
anyways, it will be a very exciting (and intense!) research project in the next few months! so much so, in fact that the next few classes i have left seem to pale in comparison in terms of interesting-ness... and i'd rather just be working on my thesis... [i've just mapped out thesis life in the next 4 months in calendar form :)... lots to do and not so much time when it's right there in front of me! yeeks!]
but anyways, it'll be good, hopefully! we have a new professor from Argentina coming in tomorrow... so deep breath....phooooooooo... and dive into another course! here we go! :)
chronicles of our move from our old apartment to a new home for the next couple months!here's some pictures :) now, all our bags are packed & ready to go!! (how do we have SO much stuff??!) bare and scrubbed clean... good bye old apartment! bye to our next door neighbours! he was so cute, he ran inside the house and brought us a cookie and gave us another hug. bye to Ana from the pulperia (little shop) a few houses down from us that we visited often when we were cooking and realized we were out of eggs or milk or something! called a taxi, and we're off! i can't believe we fit everything into one taxi! opening the door to our new house!! moving on in! my new room... with enough room for guests coming to visit! :) julianne's new room more awesome extra's... a hammock to catch a nap in! :) and a yard to play frisbee in...! our living-room-turned-saturday-night-theatre with a projector borrowed from school! :) and, most happy for me, just a very relaxing and quiet spot to write my thesis in for the next couple months! :)
i have to tell you, the last semester i got pretty depressed sometimes in our very new and nice but noisy and stuck-in-the-city home. i used to stay at school from 7am - 7pm so i could get some work done where it's quiet enough for me to think, and before i started walking to school and getting to enjoy a bit of outside that way, i'd go walk to a spot about 20 minutes away and peer through the fence of two houses to get a glimpse of the open valley and river below, and i just wanted so much to be in nature! on sundays especially, i'd try to have a bit more quiet time and read and journal, and i'd get SO frustrated with the car alarms and ATVs and screaming kids in the street, cute as they are in person. i guess i'm not quite a city girl at heart! probably near the end of october, i had found a place i hoped to move into close to here, and when everything was set and ready to go, the owner said he actually wasn't renting it out after all, and i was so disappointed. anyways, this house is even more beautiful and i am SO very thankful now for this home!
so here it is, our new home! great is thy faithfulness! :)
Rainbow, "Bow", "Shwa", "Sunshine", "Arco Iris" (my name in Spanish), or even "Rbs" as some of my best friends call me... I'll respond to any of those! But my real name Rainbow means “a promise”, “an everlasting covenant between God and all life on earth.” (See the story of Noah's Ark in Genesis 9). And true to His Word, my life is just that... a testimony of God’s faithfulness – in my life, and in the lives of those in all the earth. I experience more each day what my name means. Thanks for journeying with me around our world, and sharing in these small glimpses of His Kingdom Come on earth as it is in heaven.
