thesis joys and woes

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! :)