Thursday is a BIG day!

If all goes smoothly in the next 45.5 hours, my mom and sister will land in Windhoek!!! For those of you who are reading this and praying people, please pray for a safe, smooth, peaceful journey for them!

While Mom and Ellen are adjusting to being on another side of the planet and in a different hemisphere, I will be helping facilitate the Southern Girls Conference which starts on Thursday evening!!!

All Volunteer Conference 2006

Because HIV/AIDS is such a humungous problem in Namibia, Peace Corps brought all of us together to focus specifically on making it part of everything that we do. This means that Health volunteers are not the only ones working on HIV/AIDS issues, but all of us whether we are Education, Teacher Resource Centre, or Information Technology. I was happy to see that I am already doing that through my work with Window of Hope and that there are several other volunteers working with the same program at their schools through out Namibia. The benefit of having all the volunteers together is that there is an incredible amount of ideas shared and gained! I have many new ideas to bring back to my work at the Mariental TRC relating to HIV/AIDS and teacher training!

This is most of Peace Corps Namibia and two volunteers from Swaziland who joined us to present at the conference.

Girls Club at Danie Joubert

Last term my fellow PCV, Dani, and I started up a girls club at Danie Joubert. There have been 35 girls impacted by this club, but about 15 who participate regularly. These are some fabulous ladies who are committed to this girls club and have come up with the following topics to discuss: future/goals, role models, HIV/AIDS, preventing STIs, peer pressure, self-esteem, nutrition, sports, fashion, relationships, boyfriends, etc.

These photos are from the Danie Joubert 10K Pretloop (Fun Walk) that we did with them and Dani teaching them to "go bananas" on a Friday afternoon at girls club.

Six of these girls will represent the group at the Southern Girls Conference that will be held in Mariental 15-18 June. The conference aims to build leadership, self-esteem, empowerment, goal-setting skills, and knowledge of women's health. The representatives who attend will them bring what they have learned back to share with the others. Dani and I are also working on planning and facilitating this workshop with other PCVs and Namibian counterparts. Look for an update and photos from the conference in the future!