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Byron in the m2m office with Morgan Goheen, another PiAf Fellow |
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New Program Manager |
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Fellows’ Flyer |
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April/May 2010 |
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News and views for and by Princeton in Africa Fellows |
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In this Issue: |
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Highlights from 2009-2010 Fellows Callie Lefevre in Senegal, Mark Stevens in Zambia, and Byron Austin in South Africa |
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We are pleased to welcome Stephanie Hooper to PiAf’s team. Stephanie will join PiAf as Program Manager. She will assist part-time with our new Fellows’ orientation in May and our alumni events during Reunions before beginning full-time in June. Stephanie Hooper is a North Carolina native, but has spent the last year in the beautiful mountains of southern Vermont pursuing a Masters Degree in International Education at SIT Graduate Institute. She has extensive experience in the fields of international education, youth leadership programming and service learning. In Peru, Stephanie was a coordinator for ProWorld, working with university students engaging in service projects in local communities. In addition, she assisted in setting up a new ProWorld program site in Mysore, India. She also was a group leader for high school students participating in service learning projects in Peru and Costa Rica. Stephanie taught English as a Second language for two years in Barcelona, Spain and for one year in Kofu, Japan. She holds a BA in French and a BA in English from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. |
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A few weeks ago, as I was sitting in a rural clinic in Swaziland, talking to our staff about their experiences with client monitoring and data capturing, it really hit me how different my life had become – just one year ago, I never would have imagined such a scenario would feel “normal!” mothers2mothers, a Cape Town-based NGO, works to educate HIV+ pregnant women and new mothers in Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission (PMTCT). The organization uses a peer-education empowerment model which employs hundreds of HIV+ “Mentor Mothers” stationed at clinics across the seven countries in which we operate. m2m has grown exponentially over the past few years and has incurred increasingly challenging donor reporting responsibilities. It also seeks to learn about its own program successes in more concrete terms in order to better itself. Thus, a new Monitoring and Evaluation system was recently developed to enable the organization to enumerate its client population and track their PMTCT progress. This may sounds like a simple endeavour, but issues such as the inability to use a computerized data system and the often weak numeracy and English literacy skills of our site staff, mean a lot of adjustments must be made when working in this setting. Another challenge is getting staff to move beyond simply collecting data properly to stepping back and understanding what it means and using the findings to indentify gaps in services. When I arrived in Cape Town last July and was told I would be working in m2m’s new Department of Strategic Information and Technical Support, I fully admit to being pretty clueless about the situation. With my previous job experiences limited entirely to working behind a laboratory bench, I knew very little about research and data use applications in the NGO world. “Monitoring and Evaluation” and “Operations Research” were quite new terms to me! Over time, I was able to transition from a place where I felt completely lost to actually being able to make meaningful contributions to the DSITS team. Working with m2m, I have had the good fortune of taking part in numerous exciting organizational research projects. I travelled across Malawi for an evaluation of its country program; I travelled around Lesotho, Swaziland, and South Africa to work on providing m2m with baseline program data so we can recognize challenges and measure future progress; and I have worked extensively in the Eastern Cape in South Africa on a project at the mothers2mothers Innovation Center, a small cluster of sites where m2m pilots new initiatives before scale-up. Though my day-to-day work is not focused directly on PMTCT, it has been very satisfying to work so closely with programs at the site level. I still have much to learn, but this year has really opened my eyes in terms of what research can be and how meaningful it is on levels beyond what goes on in a lab. Though excited about where my next steps will take me, I’m certain the value of my time with m2m will never dissipate. In the end, I have nothing but gratitude to express –to Princeton in Africa, to mothers2mothers, and to the numerous women I’ve met working at the sites who remind me what it means to live life to the fullest. I will miss them the most. |
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Notes from the Field |
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After Mark worked to install electricity at a local school, kids flock by the hundreds to watch a movie on a Friday afternoon |
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Laying the foundations at the Nakatindi Health and Education Center building site |
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Mark with the fruits of his newfound fishing hobby |
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by Mark Stevens, ‘09-’10 Fellow at African Impact in Zambia |
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During any given week in Cape Town, I’m asked the question, “So, what do you do here in town?” And, shortly after mentioning that I work for an NGO, they inevitably ask, “What do they do?” I answer simply with the organizational motto: “Helping Mothers, Saving Babies.”
Although I knew that mothers2mothers empowered women through education and counseling before starting my fellowship nearly nine months ago, I had little knowledge of how they do so. This past year has been an incredibly eye-opening experience. Through the lenses that my Princeton in Africa fellowship provides, I am able to see on a daily basis how an intelligent, motivated, and dynamic group of people can work together to affect change on a nearly global scale. It was not too long ago that Dr. Mitch Besser founded the organization in 2001 with a single support group in Cape Town, yet now we are a multinational NGO with over 600 sites throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, where we encounter hundreds of thousands of HIV-positive women each year. It is truly awe-inspiring to think of where we started, where we are now, and where we are going in the not-too-distant future.
It is difficult to describe the honor and privilege that I feel on a daily basis in playing a role in such growth. When I joined the organization in July 2009, the “Development Department” consisted of me and my boss in Cape Town and the International Director in Los Angeles. Now we are ten people all working toward the common goal of raising funds and awareness for our effective programs, and thereby ensuring their scalability and longevity. Each person on this team has taught, educated, and enlightened me as to how the organization takes a simple mission, which is to create an effective, sustainable model of care that provides education and support for pregnant women and new mothers living with HIV/AIDS, and makes it an impactful reality for numerous women and children throughout the continent. Moreover, my colleagues have coached, mentored, and supported me not only in terms of my role at m2m, but also in the more general terms of my career path. They have enabled me to mold an assortment of ad-hoc, intern responsibilities into a job description for a new, employable role in the organization— a role that I will stay on to fill in the capacity of a Development Analyst. m2m has nurtured and imbued me with a set of transferable skills that I look forward to utilizing for a second year at the organization and, more generally speaking, for the rest of my career in the NGO community.
Although I am not in the field affecting change on a face-to-face basis, I can proudly say that I am part of a team that works arduously to secure funding for program activities— I perceive myself to be but only logistically removed from the one-on-one interactions that our Mentor Mothers have with our clients at the clinics. While my role concerns the legal, operational, and financial interests of the organization, the Mentor Mother and I share the same motivation in going to work every day: to help mothers, save babies. |
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by Byron Austin, ‘09-’10 Fellow at mothers2mothers in South Africa |
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Notes from the Field |
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The motto of mothers2mothers is “Helping Mothers, Saving Babies” |
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Byron on South Africa’s Garden Route |
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I am standing in the middle of a humid mangrove swamp in northern Guinea Bissau, talking to a man named Carlos Yala Timba about the possibility of rice cultivation in this area, when my mobile phone rings.
It’s my supervisor in Dakar, Senegal. “Quick question,” he says, “Is the Cote d’Ivoire press release ready to be sent to Rome for clearance? Should I ‘cc’ the Geneva office?”
And that’s when it hits me— I knew that in moving to Dakar to work for the West Africa regional office of the UN World Food Program, I would be entering a world different from any I had known before. But I didn’t realize how many different worlds I’d be entering.
To begin with, there is the professional world I inhabit at the WFP office, where I work in Public Information (PI). As half of the entire PI unit, I’ve had to quickly learn not only about West Africa and food aid, but also about the ins and outs of the UN system as I coordinate between 19 country offices and headquarters. I field media inquiries, edit news releases, write articles, and keep tabs on the PI activities of our country offices.
Dakar itself is a complex city of worlds within worlds. April 4th was Senegal’s 50th anniversary of independence from France, yet the croissant shops on every corner attest to the pervasive French influence downtown. It is arguably the most developed city in West Africa, yet power and water cuts are common in many neighborhoods, and for a few days the entire city ran out of petrol. Perhaps it is not surprising that I juggle separate spheres in my social life. The Anglophone expat scene—pool parties, outdoor sports, heavy drinking—is so clearly, so purposefully, a world unto its own, fiercely tightknit and inescapably transient. The 20-something middle-class Senegalese circle is no less insular, wrapped up in the pressure to find a job, get married, and act in accordance with Islam, all the while maintaining a rigorous clubbing schedule.
And then there is the world of Timba in the mangrove swamp, Luisa at the HIV clinic, and Nanadje in the dusty one-room school which her parents still allow her to attend because WFP provides a midday meal for all students and take-home rations for girls in the older grades. Visits into the field to gather material to publicize WFP’s projects find me smiling down village food of cornmeal couscous topped with watery yogurt, going days without enjoying water or electricity.
Experiencing these disparate and sometimes dissonant worlds has helped me see what obstacles there are to informing the public-- in other words, to doing my job. How do you raise the veil on worlds unimagined? West Africa isn’t often covered in the international media. In the nine months I’ve spent here I’ve seen how major floods, droughts, even political coups barely make it into the wire services, despite their deep impact on large populations.
Even more rarely is humanitarian work brought to light, rarer still portrayed judiciously. As the largest humanitarian organization in the world, WFP is a wide open target for criticism. The work of the PI unit is critical to educate people through the media, and increase the (positive) visibility of an agency dependent on donor generosity to continue to save lives.
Sometimes I have moments of minor schizophrenia as I shift between my various worlds—I realize I’m texting my American friend in French, or I’ve put on field-appropriate cargo pants to go to a formal press conference. But when I step outside my apartment door and return the familiar greetings of the vegetable sellers, beggars, and security guards on my walk to the office, I’m reminded that learning to navigate these worlds not only deepens my understanding of them but opens up many more for exploration. |
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by Callie Lefevre, ‘09-’10 Fellow at UN World Food Program in Senegal |
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Notes from the Field |
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Beneficiaries of a school feeding program in Guinea Bissau |
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Callie in Dakar |
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Callie visiting a WFP salt iodization project at Lac Rose in Senegal |
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Aili Petersen, our current Program Director, will be leaving PiAf on April 30th after three years of working with our fellowship program. She will begin the MPA program at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University in July. |
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New Fellows Selected |
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We hope you will join us for our:
10th Anniversary Panel May 29, 10:00 AM -12:00 PM @ McCosh 62
Alumni Gathering and Open House May 29, Post P-Rade-7:00 PM, @ 194 Nassau Street, Suite 219 Princeton in Africa alumni and friends are invited to catch up with one another and the program. PiAf staff will share highlights and recently returned Fellows will be present to discuss their experiences.
Reception for New Fellows and their Families May 31, 3:00-5:00 PM, @ 194 Nassau Street, Suite 219 A special Class Day reception for 2010-2011 Fellows and their families. Please join us as we send off our newest class of Fellows! |
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We are thrilled to announce that 27 new Princeton in Africa Fellows have been selected for our 2010-2011 fellowship year. They will work with 15 different organizations in 19 countries.
We have compiled a talented and impressive group from 14 different colleges and universities. Photos and bios of our newest Fellows will be posted shortly on the Fellows page of our website. Please check back soon to learn more about them! |
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Upcoming Events |
