Secondment

Right, so after all that I never explained what a 'secondment' is. It basically means that I'm on loan for a year to our West Africa Regional office to support the Youth Empowerment through Arts and Media project. It's kind of like a sabbatical. After the year, I'll come back to my existing position (working with the Youth Engagement and Action program at Plan in the US).

BTW -- I'm not actually MOVING to Africa (though the emails about how much you'll all miss me are very sweet, hehe)-- I'm working from the US, mostly from home, but traveling a lot to support the different countries. Coming up this summer: 3 weeks in Senegal in June for project planning with the teams from the participating countries, 1 day in Amsterdam in June to work with our office there on project ideas and potential funding, 3 weeks in Rwanda in July and 3 in Mali in September to support arts and media training. Possibly Kenya in December for a week-long de-brief/planning workshop with the teams including 3 days of discussion on social media and the use of mobile phone technology in the project.

And I know, I know. The last post was way too long. I promise the next ones will be short and sweet.

With photos! Here's one of Clare. She's busy cleaning her room this week so we can paint it before we leave. I've been promising for about a year. We'll get some advice on that from Alex (my youngest brother, pro-painter turned tech guru) who's coming to visit this weekend.

And videos! Once I figure out how to get them to load without errors. Is it me or is it blogspot? Only time will tell. I tried 3 times now to post one of Daniel playing capoeira in 3 different formats but it didn't work. I used this really cool Flip camera that I'm testing out for the project. It's the size of a Snickers bar, totally simple to use, and costs only $130.