Thursday, May 30, 2013

Regional Meeting

Many Peace Corps Country Offices have various programs functioning at the same time depending on the needs and wants of the host country. Currently the Peace Corps has six sectors including, Agriculture, Community Economic Development, Education, Environment, Health, and Youth in Development. Each Country Office provides program managers in order to meet the needs of the various volunteers in a sector as they work alongside host country nationals to build local capacities. From time to time the country offices will phase out, or incorporate new sectors to their operations depending on the goals of the host country agency that office has a relationship with.   

Here in Morocco, the country office has been phasing out the volunteers who were working in the sectors of Small Business Development, Health, and Environment, and for the past two years has only been receiving groups of Youth Development volunteers. Now, with the exception of a handful of volunteers who have extended their service, all of the volunteers in Morocco are working within the Youth in Development sector with a partnership with the Ministry of Youth and Sports. However, since having over 200 volunteers in country specializing in one program makes having only one program manager not feasible, the country is divided into eight regions, with each region having a manager to offer support for the YD volunteers. 

Julie and I live and work in Region Two, which has over 20 other volunteers. This past week we were able to meet with all of the other volunteers in our region as we gathered in the little mountain town of Azrou for our regional meeting. 

Azrou is about 2 hours from our site by way of a Grand Taxi (Not including the wait time it takes for a Grand Taxi to fill up with customers, which can sometimes be hours). Thankfully we didn't need to wait too long for our two Grand Taxi station "Layovers". When we got to Azrou we were surprised at how cold it was, since it was early June and our site had been hot for days. We stayed at a quaint hotel for two nights where we not only met with the other PCV's from our region, but with our regional manager, Hoda, and our new Country Director, Ellen (insert last name). It was the first time we had been able to meet Ellen, and both Julie and I were duly impressed with her presence, demeanor, and her experience including working as a former country director for Morocco, Mongolia, and most recently a regional director of N. Africa, Middle East, and Asia. 

Hoda, our regional manager, assured us this was not a training, but a meeting where we would be hearing from other volunteers and the work they were doing, and discussing challenges we were facing with our service and would be facing with the coming summer months and Ramadan. I thoroughly enjoyed being able to hear about the success of others and how they have been able to make relationships within and without the Dar Chebabs (Youth Centers) they were working at in order to build local capacities. We learned of projects ranging from a magazine published by youth about the social challenges of their town, to a regional program where Moroccan youth developed leadership skills through mountain hiking, to a national English spelling bee for youth organized by Peace Corps volunteers. We also spent time meeting with the volunteers located closest to us in order to explore the potential for collaboration. The experience was a great space for me to contemplate more on the service we were rendering and hoped to render in the future. 

As we were hearing from sub-regions in our group account for the work or projects they had done, were doing, and were planning on doing, a question arose about measuring results and how that relates to project planning and implementation. Essentially, why did it seem as though many of the volunteers were talking about their projects as the "ends" in and of themselves and not the "means" to achieve the desired results, or goals, from the Youth Development Framework developed by Peace Corps Morocco, The Ministry of Youth and Sports, and Peace Corps Washington. Our regional manager, Hoda, assured us that the ideal was to use the goals and objectives from the Youth Development Framework to initially design our projects, but that since the Framework has been evolving, with former groups have been trained with different versions of the framework, and the framework's breadth being able to lend itself to covering most activities we enact, that the "status quo" was to more or less focus on indicators after all is said and done, and when volunteers need to input those indicators, or metrics in their quarterly accountability reports. 

The meeting was a success in that Julie and I were able to interface with other volunteers in our region, get inspired from others for what our service will look like, and also wrestle with questions of development like how do we measure success, and how do we make sure that we are starting with the end in mind, having our plans work toward our goals, and not having our plans be the goals themselves.


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