New Project!

These days I am very happily busy participating in the starting up of a big, new program here in our district. The project title is, “Empowerment of Excluded Rural Women in Nepal”. A five year program with impressive and comprehensive goals such as (1) increasing the women in local government from 5% to 33%, (2) decreasing infant mortality rates and access to health care in general (3) insuring girls in rural areas have consistent access to education, and (4) increasing the income generation ability of rural women.

Yesterday I facilitated a workshop on gender that sparked much interest and discussion amongst the staff. They haven’t received any training like this in the past – gender roles in more rural areas are largely not contested - and are hugely curious to learn more.

Today and tomorrow staff are learning about how to conduct baseline surveys in the community. Then, we head in groups “to the field” for 15 days to implement the actual survey. This means that there will be groups of 4 of us (inclusive of at least one community health worker and one woman minimum) who will go into areas that are quite remote, and new to COSAN’s working area.

Staff will draw maps of villages (54 maps total): every road, house, temple, public building. Then will conduct surveys on resources (and lack of resources) in communities, individual and group interviews, and very comprehensive health questionnaires.

I have been asked to lead one of the teams. While I feel excited to be involved and very comfortable with what we have to do and how to lead the team, I am a bit overwhelmed by the language barrier I face still. I have been promised at least one person on my team who speaks really good English to help translate when necessary, however. Tomorrow I will remind my counterpart that I also need boiled water and hopefully a place to sleep without too many mice. My first village stay during my in-country-training program left me a bit scared about mice in village homes….and I really do need to sleep *some* in 15 days…

So, I likely will be off-line for a bit. But surely will have some interesting stories to share when I return.