What the #$% is going on at the bureau?

Well, thankfully, not much. I mentioned a while back that the Volunteer Advisory Committee(VAC), which I'm a part of, was going to have a meeting with the bureau's senior staff. These meetings occur every quarter and are meant as a valve for the general Volunteer community to voice their concerns through their VAC rep. The meeting occured the 1st and 2nd of March. The 1st was just a day for VAC to get together, organize our thoughts and prepare for the real meeting with the senior staff the following day. On the 2nd, we met with the seniour staff. This particular meeting was abnormal because the previous meetings had just the Country Director,Marily, and the Adminstrative Officer, Jeff(VERY Cool dude). The previous meetings were honestly akward and tense. This meeting however had most of the senior staff actually present. It included most of the APCD's(Assistant PeaceCorp Directors)(which are in charge of respective sector's like health, education, etc.), and Marily, Jeff, and a few others who were present to address other organizational concerns. The lead up to this meeting was expectantly tense. Everyone knew what we were going to bring up as a general volunteer concern. The pics from the computers and what the hell they were about.

Well, the meeting in summation went suprisingly well. Everyone kept their cool and points were made and explained on both sides. The only thing that didn't fly was that, the bureau explained the photo's were found "accidentally". The photo of the volunteer on a moto, unfortunately, couldn't be dealt with, beyond the fact they found it, they had no choice but to follow through with the regulations. They expressed the difficulty of having to send Elizabeth home and honest regret of the situation, but the "accidental" find left them no choice.

Their explanation of how they handled the situation pertaining the method of notifying respective volunteers via cryptic text messages and phone calls was an honest, "Yeah, we shouldn't have done it that way". That's about as much as we could have asked for.

We then went on to explain, due to these incidents and a subsequent negative publication by the CD condemning volunteers' behavior in general with an article boldly titled "I'm Disappointed", that the general moral is the lowest it's been during our tenure in country. We further spoke that positive reinforcement from the bureau as a whole has been absent and needed to be amended for moral to improve. Thankfully Marily, the CD, listened to use with an open ear and since then has made and honest attempt to go out of her way to give positive reinforcement. Much to the happy surprise of many volunteers. Including myself.

So, since then, things have calmed down. We've recieved new computers and now, no volunteers keep any private information on them. Thus, my only back up is really my thumb-drive. Wish me luck with that.

Other news with the bureau, I've been working on preparing a cross sectoral conference for volunteers in other sectors who are interested in working on health related activities. That's to occur in June sometime and hopefully will get a good response.
Also, Still doing working with the AIDS Task Force(ATF) which I was tasked to set up with a fellow health volunteer, Jamie Butler-Dawson. Besides sounding like the A-Team(that being our nickname) we set up a quick start committee to get the word out to all sectors about AIDS awareness, activities and ideas. The real reason for the group is to collect data from volunteers who have done AIDS related activities and log their data for washington to follow. Doing this in order to keep track and begin to see what sort of impact we're having. The committee just started and our next meeting will be in June and will hopefully start compiling useful data then. Good Times.

The VAC meeting will also have some meeting, I believe in June/July but it's far enough away, I'm not sure of the dates either. I just need to get through the next couple months first. :-) Hope that clears up some unfinished letters I sent before. More to come soon. Next, What the hell is going on with your house. Lots-o-drama there. Stay tuned, no really, I'll post about it soon.