Book Review: "Eat, Pray, Love"

Right now, I'm in between jobs and so I have some extra time to enjoy reading and ponder a bit about what I've read.

I recently finished re-reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. What book isn't great that pronounces the wonders of eating pasta and pizza?
Gilbert tells her stories, and weaves her history into how she got to her present state (of living four months each in Italy, India and Indonesia for a year), in an incredible way. As a writer, I look to her writing as a guide or other inspiration on writing style.

As we get into more crazy world and lives, there are three simple things that we can maximize within our lives:

• Pleasure
• Devotion
• Balance

While Gilbert goes off on a round-the-world trip to seek these out, it's important to also cultivate these within our daily lives as well. With the extra time on my hands right now, it's something that I'm working on too!

An end to real life?

Reading CNN.com today I saw this article about the rising popularity of virtual reality. While I am all about taking advantage of technologies in order to make life easier and more productive, part of me wonders whether it's actually beneficial to be spending more time online rather than in real life. Small ways we do this are texting versus calling, or sending emails to a person in our same office environment. Do we get the same emotional and personal impact out of these interactions as we do out of a hug or a conversation?

Thoughts on virtual reality?

Reflections from the window - project evaluations

As one of the last steps of the summer program with AMIGOS (and any good project methodology), we took some time to evaluate how the program went. We had some interesting conversations among the staff team as to how to implement the evaluations, in addition to the topics discussed within the evaluations.

We used a participatory evaluation method, which succinctly, means to involve participants in the evaluation process. For AMIGOS, this meant to get the opinions of people from all aspects of involvement with the program: host families, youth group members who worked with our volunteers, partnering agency contacts, to even community members who weren't involved with the program much.

The evaluation process looked different based on the different levels at which we evaluated

• At the community level, supervisors might have coordinated a town meeting to evaluate the project in a group with community members. In some communities, a town meeting wasn't feasible; these supervisors might have conducted multiple interviews with various community members and key players, or even distributed surveys to community members.
• At the partnering agency level, directors and supervisors met with PLAN contacts that we had worked with. We evaluated how the summer went: successes, challenges, suggestions. Based on the AMIGOS mission statement, what did we do well? what difficulties did we encounter? what suggestions do we have for next year?

One of the interesting topics of discussion when we were planning out our evaluation methodologies was whether the presence of our youth volunteers (who had been living and working in the communities) would affect the responses in the evaluation. While communities might be more reticient to discuss the challenges of their volunteers when the vols are right there, there was also the consideration of how to teach or pass along knowledge about the evaluation process to volunteers. None of our project supervisors (responsible for directly overseeing volunteers in the communities) had ever done a participatory evaluation before, either because the eval process was different when they were a volunteer, or more likely, that the participatory evaluation had always been conducted post-volunteer departure from the communities.

Here's an interesting document on involving youth in the participatory evaluation process published by the Program for Youth and Community at the University of Michigan.

In the end, we came to a consensus on a two-part participatory evaluation. First, that there would be some sort of participatory evaluation in all communities while the volunteers were still there. In general, this was the meaty evaluation step, although in some communities supervisors encountered challenges that prevented them from doing a thorough evaluation at this point. Next, supervisors returned to each community after volunteers left the country in order to check that everything was indeed OK with the volunteers and to complete the participatory evaluation process as needed.

The final step of the evaluation process was to complete the documentation on these evaluations. We created a number of documents based on the multi-faceted evaluation process:

• Community-specific evaluation summaries - for next year's staff to review and learn from at the beginning of the summer
• Partnering Agency evaluation matrix - based on the notes from three different partnering agency evaluation meetings we held (with the three PLAN offices with which we worked)
• Final Evaluation documents - we created one in Spanish and a summary in English that narrated our evaluation of the project. I focused on the key issues we had encountered throughout the summer, as well as common threads from all of our participatory evaluation encounters. These documents also included a more quantitative component that enumerated all of the projects we worked on this summer (# of hours of children's camps, # of murals painted, etc.)

What have your experiences been on evaluations of projects? Self-evaluations?

Taino Art Workshop Update

An update on the Taino art workshop project that I have been working on this summer. (read previous posting here) The project is to build a workshop space in one of the rural Dominican communities for practicing and teaching the Taino-style sculpture that they do:

After some significant roadblocks, we purchased materials and started construction on the workshop!

Since I last wrote, we discovered some challenges to community mobilization and support for the project. When we went out to visit, expecting a ground-breaking ceremony, the preparatory work that we expected to be completed was not done yet. There had been some challenges with the maestro (the main expert on the project) in completing the work in a timely manner, as well as with the local youth to rally community support to keep this project going.

It didn't look good. With the short time frame that we have for the AMIGOS projects, we had to look at how we could best get the community on board with a youth-based project, and to understand that the project was not just for the few youth leading the project organization.

PLAN and the AMIGOS project director went out to this community the next evening for a meeting, and there were some amazing turnaround results!

• The community members committed to getting the preparatory work and materials completed within 5 days
• They appointed an adult leader/laison for the project

We delivered the materials a few days later, just before the end of the summer AMIGOS volunteer program. It was a lot of fun to get the materials from a ferreteria (hardware store) and deliver them in a huge truck out to this community. El Capa is a bit difficult to get to -- you have to cross a river -- so it was quite a different perspective travelling in a vehicle that I knew wouldn't get stuck or have any trouble in the river.


After the end of the AMIGOS project this summer, I went back to El Capa to check on the progress of the art workshop construction. The construction was moving along, and below you can see the posts and wire set up in preparation for pouring concrete walls. The group of adults monitoring the project has been active and working closely with the youth members on making sure the project progresses, and resolving issues that had come up. It was also good to see the community, and also say goodbye to some of the great people I met there. Here are some photos from the visit:

Overall, it has been a positive experience in seeing a community come together for a long-term sustainable project directed from within the same community. I look forward to seeing the progress in the coming months on this construction!