hola friends!! i'm sorry to have disappeared for the month - i hope a nice long blog post will make up for it! :) i've enjoyed my classes and projects but it definitely keeps me energizer-bunny going! i was just reading this morning in a book (called 'The Rest of God: Restoring your soul by restoring the Sabbath' by Mark Buchanan) a little blurb that i think well describes my life here in the last little bit!
"It's not that I don't enjoy what I do - I love it most days, except Mondays, and sometimes Wednesdays, and every Thursday afternoon... but all the rest of the time I love it. Actually, that's the problem: I love it overmuch. I spend an average amount of time doing my work, fifty hours or so a week. No more, maybe a tad less, than most people at their jobs. But then I spend many more hours thinking about my work, talking about it, stewing over it, jotting memos to myself concerning it... I'll lie in bed and remember some [little thing] I want to look up or think up some new slant on a conversation I should therefore resume, and I'll spring out of bed and shuffle downstairs to scrawl something in a journal or rummage a scrap note from a hay stack of paper.
In a word, I'm obsessed."minus that i don't have stairs to go down, and that i'm pretty sure my school work adds up to well more than 50 hours a week, i say that sums up life here, especially as i'm heading into the last 2 weeks of class (crazy!) and 2 months of thesis! i don't like "obsessed" per se :)... but i guess i am devoting my best to make the most of my time here studying about peace education this year! always too much to think about and not enough time to think about it all... but while the busy-ness is, well.. busy, i do enjoy what im doing for the most part. :) and my friends remind me to take a break every now and then to enjoy a trip out to the movies or into San Jose for nothing more than a stroll and an ice cream like i did this weekend.
here's some of what i've been working on... in no particular order! :)
**i realize that the links aren't working - i'm not sure why, but i'll try to get them up and running soon**
Projects: - Designing
a literacy (reading and writing) program for Sierra Leone that focuses on learning about the "official" post-war justice institutions - the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Special Court - which is generally my idea for my thesis.
- Creating a program lesson plan for
"Language-based Literacy and Justice" that is supposed to be a preparation for the post-war justice institutions program, using local-language words, expressions and metaphors as a basis for exploring and evaluating what "justice" means within one's own culture.
- Analyzing the
language policy and language situation of Sierra Leone and what this means for literacy programs. In summary, I think that literacy learning in mother tongues is important, and adding second language learning (in Krio especially, as a commonly spoken language throughout the country) can be useful for peacebuilding.
- Designing a proposed
3-week course for the UPEACE MA in Peace Education program on "Peace Education in Violent and Post-Violent Conflicts" because this is what I came to learn about at UPEACE... and to my surprise, hasn't been a major focus throughout the year. So myself and some other students took it on as a final project for one of our courses to do some research and design a new course. I'm not sure if and when it might actually become a course for UPEACE, and I haven't had the time to try working on the logistics of it with our Department Head... but she did come see when we did a presentation and seemed impressed with the positive response from our class.
Other things: - i started doing an internship last month with the
UPEACE Human Rights Center, working with a professor on research to support the work of a
UN independent expert on the question of human rights and extreme poverty. we're working on a project on the linkages between poverty, conflict and human rights, which has been really interesting. and sad. i was reading and summarizing an article last night on young people in armed conflict in Sierra Leone and it was sad to see how things that are really supposed to help, like the Disarmament programs for ex-combatants get used by commanders as part of the "deal" for recruiting fighters. i'll be working with the project til mid-June... more to keep me on my toes!
- i applied for an internship with
UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), in their Education in Post-Conflict and Post-Disaster section and had an interview last week... but i didn't get the job. but that's okay! many things to explore and do!
- quite a few weeks ago now, but i did
a presentation about violence against women the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Africa) on campus with my friend Sierra as part of the
v-day campaign ... the decades-long civil war has been called the deadliest war since World War II, with rape and sexual violence being used on a massive scale as a tactic of war. the link is for the powerpoint we used, adapted from the v-day support site, and i think it gives a really good overview of the war and situation if you'd like to have a peak.
and lastly, some of what i'd love to be working on one day but just don't have time at the moment to put my mind there yet...-
"techy gadgets and the Congo!" (for lack of a better name at the moment!) from some of the research for the Congo presentation, i found that almost every electronic we use (cell phones, lap tops, ipods) has tin and coltan (minerals) in it. i also found out that something like 80% of the world's coltan and much of the tin is mined in the Congo. the minerals are sold by the conflicting parties in the Congo and the profits used to fund the ongoing war. so... all these gadgets we buy in part helps fund the war in the Congo. who knew??!! soo... what can we do? my idea (which isn't mine!) is to let more people know, and work on pressuring companies like Apple or Motorola or whatever, to ensure that what goes into their products is "conflict free". like the movie Blood Diamond, that at the end, prompted people to buy certified conflict-free diamonds... but to do the same thing for conflict-free coltan and tin in electronics. i have more ideas about this... but they are temporarily on the shelf. if anyone wants to take it on, go get 'er, that would be awesome!! :) here are two websites that might help!
Raise Hope for the Congo;
Enough Project- even better than just certified conflict-free diamonds/minerals, how much more awesome would it be still to have
certified peace diamonds/minerals? i found out that the peace agreements signed in Sierra Leone at the end of the war spelled out that proceeds from the diamonds were supposed to be used for development (including health services, education, etc). i included in my Post-War Justice Literacy Program plan an idea about fund-matching for raising $$ through projects and having them matched by the government through diamond proceeds, with the $$ going to reparation programs for victims of the war. if there was some way to certify that the proceeds from a diamond went specifically to funding peace-building activities, how wonderful would that be? i'd want one of those on my finger one day! :)
- something we called
"Transport Peace"! Myself and two of my classmates "came up" with this idea one day during class of using the Translink bus/skytrain/seabus system in BC as a space for peace education, and kind of designed what some of the elements of it might look like... and then my professor from Argentina told us that it was a nice idea, and went on to tell us about this amazing project she which printed little tid-bits of info about Human Rights on bus tickets in Buenos Ares (the capital of Argentina) to teach people about human rights, and since then, the bus tickets have been used and reserved for educating about social justice-related things! here's some pictures of the bus tickets.
pretty awesome hey? i want to do this in Vancouver before someone gets to Translink to turn the bus tickets into more corporate advertising space...
but i guess we will see... that's it for now! i know this wasn't probably the most exciting post with not a lot of pictures, but as i told my class when i did a presentation on my Language-Based Literacy and Justice project last week - i know it's been a long day, but this is my idea for my thesis, so try to get excited with me for just a little bit! :)
hehe... i've got lots of pictures though, especially from over the Easter break, when my friends came to visit. so i'll try to put some of those up soon to make up for my lack of more fun stories and pictures of this post. just for fun for now, here's a couple more pictures of creepy crawly visitors to our house, til my next post. :)
finger-long millipede of some kind...
i dont know what these beetle-ly bugs are called, but there's tons of them in our house every night if we leave doors or windows open when it gets dark. they fly around and crash into the walls, or walk off the end of the table, and fall on their backs and can't get back up again... so Julianne and i take the broom and play golf with them out the door like at a driving range :)
giant cockroach.. beside my size 6 shoe.
scorpion #3 in our house - longer than the light switch is wide! yikes!
swarms of giant wasp-sized ants i found nesting (nests and eggs and all) in the bookshelves of my room that took me 4 hours to clean out. (for being so bug-squimish i was pretty proud of myself for dealing with them - although my neighbour had no pity on me for massacre-ing another life form and refused to give me a good-job-hug!)
ok, bedtime for me now, sweet dreams! hehe, ill have nicer pictures next time, i promise. (and i'll let you know when i get those links fixed) :)
hugs and smiles,
xo
rainbow =)
