IST 2

Finished Inter-Service Training on Friday, so I'm officially all trained up for another six months.  Due up: Mid-Service Training, come November of this year.  Which reminds me– I need to ask off for the first couple of weeks of November for my brother's wedding.  I hope the two don't overlap...

If there is one thing that IST is actually good for, it's the (albeit mild) external motivation to take a second look at stalled projects, consider some alternative routes for success in those projects, and the very welcome inspiration to create some new projects at the same time.  I jotted down notes on a few new ideas, as follows in order of closeness to actualization: (a) scheduling a Teacher training in Math Activities before the start of the school term in September, (b) start up an IT training course at the NSTP, possibly in combination with another PCV who has experience in PC hardware repair, and (c) a boy's abstinence club under the auspices of St. George's Anglican, in conjunction with the junior priest there, Fr. Christopher Archibald.  I don't have any personal experience in Youth ministry, but I think this kind of thing would be pretty simple, as long as community buy-in was high and activities were kept diverse and entertaining.  I'll keep everyone updated, of course, but in the meantime, pray for motivation and fortitude to finish my current projects before fully diving into these others.

VOW honours 100 women of Nevis

I did get to go to Nevis on Tuesday, as expected.  On the left is the promotional poster my fellow PCV and I developed over one 6-hour session.  The first 2 hours were spent just trying out different ideas and creating corresponding blank templates for the art.  Since the project will eventually be printed onto 2' x 3' posters, signed (by yours truly) and sold, the blank image was set up to be 24" x 36" at 300 ppi – a mistake, since the resulting filesize would be 1.85 GB.  A simple "save" command in the GIMP of a file that size took longer than 5 minutes.  We eventually settled on a more feasible 100 ppi, to be expanded upon completion if necessary.  The final product, about 6-7 times larger than the image to the left, is still 7.5 MB, one of the largest PNGs I've ever made.  The revealing of the artwork came on Thursday, and was well-received, according to my sources.  Certainly the Institutional Partner on Nevis, who led the event, was pleased with the result.  The design for the woman came from previous artwork that Voices of Women had used in previous promos, but the trace of Nevis and the collage of photos is all original work for the poster.  Here's hoping that my fellow PCV and VOW, her women's empowerment NGO can utilize the project as an effective fundraiser.


I just went through my backlog of photos, so I'll post a small collection from a different event for the next several posts.  (Yay pictures!)  Today's batch is from all the way back in March: St. Patrick's Day, to be precise.  I visited a fellow PCV's class at Sandy Point Secondary for the afternoon and tried out a couple of my Math Games, to much appreciation, participation, and excitement.

Playing "Honey Comb Home" with about 20 second-formers from SPS.

The tactile experience of rolling the dice was a positive causal-relation activity, easy for the students to grasp.

The teacher, after watching one class, got excited enough to get involved in the second round.

Afterwards, we all went down to Old Road to celebrate St. Patty's Day and engage in some local dominoes action.