A PEPFAR Grant and Training

My first grant went through! It's only for about $180, but it went through just fine, so next weekend we are going to sell fruit tree seedlings in the village (orange, lemon, passion fruit, custard apple, guava and a few more). We are buying them for the equivalent of 50 cents and selling them to villagers who attend a seminar for 5 cents each. We're doing a seminar on how to care for seedlings properly, so that hopefully they will all survive. The grant is PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), so I had to make the project relate to AIDS as much as possible. There's a group that takes care of orphans by providing them with a plot of land to farm and seeds when they graduate from the 7th grade, and they get to order seedlings first. Then the seminar will include a little spiel about how fruit relates to proper nutrition, and how proper nutrition is so important for people with diseases like AIDS. I'm excited.

We are in Iringa for AIDS education training, so today we went to an elementary school and taught two lessons. It was surprising to me how much the kids already know. I think what is really needed are more life skills lessons, where they learn and practice skills like saying "no" assertively, having positive role models and developing goals. I hadn't really thought much about how important those things are until recently. I can see how much easier it would be to do the right thing in a tough situation if you'd done a skit about it in class, or if you had some lines prepared to say to someone who was pressuring you. It is a lot like the DARE program from elementary school (Drug Abuse Resistance Education). My counterpart and I are thinking about how we are going to teach when we get back to the village.














It is nice to be in town and get things like cheese and chocolate, but it will be nice to get back to my little farm!