My Counterpart

August 7, 2007

Just a quick note. I met my counterpart today and I couldn’t be more excited about where I’m going. He speaks a little English but understands quite a bit. At the conference we had an opportunity to get to know each other the best we could with our limited language abilities. Mainly we talked about our families, which always gets interesting when I try to explain how I have 6 sisters and 5 brothers. People here aren’t used to the idea of split families. Then we tried to talk about why I’m 30 and not married. The usual first conversation talk over here.

After all the formal talk we were able to get down to talking about what their expectations are of me and what they envision me accomplishing during my service. He explained that they were completely open to any new ideas and would support almost anything I could bring. He explained that there are tons of youth wanting to attend English conversation clubs (which I thought the best use of my time would be to build a program where I teach the older youth how to run conversation clubs rather than me running clubs that will be gone when I am or when PC is done). Currently they have a bunch of soccer teams as well as some judo and wrestling all for the boys. So I think I’d like to focus some of my time on creating opportunities for girls to participate. One of the NGO’s that have come and talked to us told us about an area that started ultimate Frisbee teams and because it was a new sport gender roles weren’t already established and they got boys and girls to play together which is a completely different concept here. I’ve thought that would be tons of fun, but I won’t really know what they want or need until I spend some time in the community. I’m just excited that they are open and willing to explore new ideas.