v3#4

Sometimes I write this thing as much for my own benefit as anyone else´s. Where exactly am I? Oh yeah, the Dominican Republic. I got here this afternoon on a two prop island hopper from Haiti. My five weeks in Haiti were a bit of everything. The Haitian staff and myself spent several days in the border community of Terre Froide (18.37904N, 71.82652W) conducting what is called a Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA). A PRA is basically a series of exercises which an organization conducts in order to better understand the community where they intend to work, and more importantly--as the name suggests--to allow the community to participate in the planning process for a new program which might be coming to their area. This particular PRA lasted two days, and resulted in a list of the most significant problems in the community as well as proposed solutions for each problem. All of this work is basically done by the community members, and our job as an organization is basically to listen.

Lots more happened in the past 5 weeks than the PRA, and maybe if I´m feeling energetic at some point I will post some stuff on the blog. Right now I´m pretty much exhausted, and need to get rested up, because we are going to repeat the whole process on the Dominican side of the border starting tomorrow morning!

Photo: a group of farmers representing 3 of the 12 communities attending the PRA, discuss the major problems in their particular areas.