Visions Service Adventures
VISIONS Blog
Monique Schmidt directed VISIONS service programs abroad in Guadeloupe and at home in Montana. A poet, teacher and published author (her memoir Last Moon Dancing is the story of her Peace Corps years in Africa), Monique moved to Rwanda last November to be Program Director for the Akilah Institute for Women, the first vocational and leadership training institute for young women in Rwanda. Akilah provides quality education and vocational training to young women who are unable to attend university. The women spend a year getting grounded in English language, computer skills, and introductory hospitality classes. Then they and other young women from around Rwanda begin a two-year diploma program to learn vocational and technical skills for the hospitality and tourism industry.
Monique sends us emails regularly, always a mix of the profound and mundane as you’ll read here in some excerpts. You’ll also read how Monique is using VISIONS’s process for reflection (part of every VISIONS program) to good effect at Akilah.
Work on Akilah continues to move forward....went to a girls' meeting in a poor neighborhood to recruit students and after the dancing and singing, I talked to some girls about scholarships. They got such big smiles...it makes my sunburn worth it...
Went to see the churches that have been left "as is" as memorials... In one, 5000 people were [killed]... In another 10,000. …the clothes of victims remain in piles... It is mind boggling and has affected me deeply…I think these are the last memorials I will see for a while.
While phone communication has been tricky, I have learned how to say DRIVE SLOWLY to the moto taxi dudes. Sometimes it works miracles, other times I am convinced the driver thinks he is in the Indy 500. I struggle to keep my blood pressure down. The motos in Togo and Benin were not this scary.... So far, my favorite type of moto ride is what I call the "slow squeeze" ...It happens when there is so much congested traffic all the moto can do is slowly squeeze between cars and trucks... I'm not worried about the accidents at 10 miles per hour. It’s when we have the open road that I spend all my time making ridiculous bargains with the universe to keep me alive...
Four new team members arrived this week...three from the States and one from Uganda. They are passionate and competent...plus their arrival means I'm not alone over here any more...
Classes open in two weeks…we have an incredible amount of work to do still… We're having some problems because even though the girls have scholarships to come to school, they can't afford transport or lunch...
One of the challenges of creating a school is writing the student handbook. Creating a mission statement and articulating the values of a school require some deep thinking. I have thought about it for days and days, looked at other schools’ examples, pondering how to articulate exactly what Akilah stands for and what we want our students to strive for. Finally, and with the help of my staff, I came up with the Five Pillars of Akilah. They are 1) personal conduct and academic honesty 2) respect for community 3) innovation and creativity 4) leadership and service 5) relentless commitment to excel.
We created a pledge centered on the Five Pillars and asked each student to sign the pledge. I was to present the pledge, and so I wrote each of the pillars on the board. The problem is that for number 5. I wrote “rentless” commitment to excel. They all copied it down in their books and agreed to it. A photographer/ videographer was there for our first week, so the moment has been immortalized… lovely…just the way I want to be remembered… You can go to sleep at night comforted by the fact that I and 50 young Rwandan women are all working on our “rentless” commitment to excel…
Today was our first day of classes, and it worked! The students showed up, the teachers
"Let me introduce myself. My name is Gineen Klein, and I've been brought on as an intern to replace the promotion department here at Propensity Books...and have some excellent ideas for promotion.
To start: Do you blog? If not, get in touch with Kris and Christopher from our online department, although at this point I think only Christopher is left. I'll be out of the office from tomorrow until Monday, but when I get back I'll ask if he spoke to you. We use CopyBuoy via Hoster Boraster, because it streams really easily into a Plaxo/LinkedIn yak-fest meld. When you register, click "Endless," and under "Contacts" just list everyone you've ever met. It would be great if you could post at least 6,000 words every day until further notice...
If you already have a blog, make sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they're better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold...."
WHAAT?!!? Okay, it's a joke. These paragraphs open "Subject: Our Marketing Plan," which appeared in the October 19 issue of The New Yorker magazine. The piece is a hilariously tongue-in-cheek spoof on blogging and viral marketing, and the confounding convolution of it all, or at least it seems to me.
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