YETAM Senegal almost set

Not really working, since I'm on vacation, but almost done with the translations for the YETAM Senegal videos. Just about 5 more to go. They are finishing up 2 of the videos with scenes from school when school starts, and there are 2 more to upload to dotsub, about 4 to translate, and we're done with the first set. After dotsub, then I just upload the translations to the closed caption program on YouTube so now you can watch them in French and English. We still need to upload some of the videos to YouTube, but Ayla's going to get that done starting Jan 5. Photo: Alex, me, Mike at Laguna Beach on Wednesday.

www.youtube.com/user/planyetam

The website creation is also moving. AK the web company is building it with a bunch of the recommendations that people gave during the SM4SC workshop and other ideas we had awhile ago.

I'm in Los Angeles still and we're off today to visit UCLA and USC, my favorite Mexican restaurant, La Barca, and Griffith Park. I'm going to meet up with my college roommate while the kids and my brothers go to the zoo. Then we're meeting some extended family -- the kids' only cousins, whom we haven't seen for about 10 years. Should be a good day!

YETAM on YouTube now!

I'm so excited because now YouTube has captions now. And I have a GREAT intern named Ayla who is doing all the subtitling for the Rwanda videos. She's posted several of them on dotsub.com and done the subtitles from Kinyarwandan and from English (using the documents that Joseph and Baptiste did). Chrystel from Plan Rwanda will send us the French versions soon, and so all 3 planned languages will be done.

We were getting some comments that the videos were not loading quickly so we are testing with YouTube and now will be posting in both places. Basically it's really simple. We take the videos and compress them into flash (.flv) files, and upload them to dotsub.com to do the subtitling. Then we upload them also to YouTube and we download the subtitle files from YouTube and re-upload/attach them to the YouTube file. And it's working super well. I started a PlanYETAM channel so as the videos get loaded they will be available there.

http://www.youtube.com/user/PlanYETAM

Once Ayla finishes uploading Rwanda films, we should have the Mali and the Senegal ones in hand to start uploading. I'm hoping that the web company can the just embed the videos from YouTube and they will come complete with the captions. You can also use geo-location from YouTube, which is cool since I've been wanting to do a google earth overlay for quite awhile, and now with the videos on YouTube it will be a snap. Ayla is already figuring it out -- she's great!

I am dying to see the Senegal and Mali films since I wasn't at the training. Mali sent a really cool attachment with their quarterly report. They used an evaluation methodology called Most Significant Change where you use storytelling to identify the most significant change from the training. So there are some amazing stories and quotes from the kids in there. I hope that we can use this for the upcoming YETAM projects in the next countries.

I had to do a presentation today at our office because it's already been 6 months that I've been on this 'secondment' or special assignment with the West Africa office. I can't believe it's gone by so fast. I think I've enjoyed almost every minute of it.