Buh Bye Swaziland

Hey Everyone! Yes, I am still alive. No posts since March... wow. Shame on me. This extension year has been... many things: hard, rewarding, impossible, fantastic, educational, soul crushing, exhausting, and many more contradictory feelings. I finished at Baylor last Friday and my roommates left today. I get to go see my host family, BoDlamini, tomorrow and stay in my community over the weekend. I'm really looking forward to going down there. Then next week I wrap up everything at the Peace Corps office and get on a plane for Thailand on Saturday September 15th!! I will try my best to keep the updates more frequent and more interesting during the travels. To make up for the lost updates over the past months, I will copy and paste the final third of my DOS. A DOS is your "Description of Service", which will be the only piece of paper the PC keeps on me. I had to write a description, in third person, of every work related thing I accomplished in the past 3 years and 3 months. This paper doesn't capture the relationships, learning experiences, and hardships. It misses the growth and the breaking down. It can't begin to show the smiles of my Teen Club kiddos as they sing the "World's Greatest" or the ridiculous sexist, racist, and ageist bull-s%*t received from superiors. It will tell you my job, but not my experience. You'll have to wait until December 21st, when I land in TC, for all of that. :-) Third Year Extension Placement Ms. Crocker chose to extend her service for an additional 13 months in the Kingdom of Swaziland. During this period, she worked at the Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative clinic in the capitol city of Mbabane as the Adolescent Psychosocial Support (PSS) Officer. Teen Club Coordinator: Ms. Crocker’s main role in the psychosocial support department of the clinic was to run the entire Teen Club Program. As stated previously, this is a support group for adolescents living with HIV. She coordinated all four support group sites: Hlathikhulu, Manzini, Mbabane, and Siphofaneni – one in each region of the country. The program runs on a yearly budget of $141,480 and provides support and lifeskills/health teachings to over 800 active youth. Curriculum Development: Every month a new health or lifeskill topic is taught to the Teen Club youth. Ms. Crocker created original, age and culturally appropriate lesson plans for basic savings and banking, child abuse prevention and reporting, safe romantic relationships, respect for people and the environment, medication adherence, gender equity and equality, coping with stress, as well as exercise and nutrition. Reporting: Ms. Crocker was charged with the duty to write professional program reports quarterly for monitoring and evaluation within Baylor and for donor partner organizations. Partner Organization Meeting: To better coordinate the PSS services for the adolescent population in Swaziland, to share resources and ideas, and to best plan the location of possible Teen Club expansion, Ms. Crocker coordinated and led a meeting with eight prominent organizations actively implementing programs with this age group. She then combined the information and contacts collected at this gathering and distributed it amongst all of the stakeholders. Evaluation and Internal Program Research Review: The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) financially supported an internal study of the Teen Club program to identify programming successes and gaps. Ms. Crocker worked with the Baylor Monitoring and Evaluation Officer and the research consultant to orchestrate the hiring of data collectors, see to their training of the interview form, organize the interview logistics, account for the correct representative sample size, and help review and edit the analysis report. International AIDS Conference: Six Teen Club youth and a Swazi Teen Club Coordinator attended the International AIDS Conference in Washington, DC, July 19th – 30th, 2012. Ms. Crocker initiated this program and oversaw every aspect of the planning process. This included, the teen selection process, fundraising $12,436, teen preparation workshops, editing and submitting scholarship applications, passport and US visa processing, a successful proposal for a Teen Club booth at the conference, creation and preparation of booth display materials, logistical planning of all transport, accommodation, travel healthcare, and per diem distribution for all participants, and managed all financial payments while working within the fundraised budget. This was the first time any BIPAI patient or youth represented the clinic or the Kingdom of Swaziland at this kind of event. It is being considered a successful pilot project in which Ms. Crocker’s report will provide the groundwork for similar initiatives at future International AIDS Conferences world-wide. End of the Year Event: The final Teen Club session of 2011 brought nearly 500 youth from all regions of Swaziland and 150 adult volunteers together for a large health education, Christmas celebration, and Teen Club member graduation event. Ms. Crocker planned, organized, and managed the implementation of this undertaking. Teen Leadership Training: Ms. Crocker planned and implemented a three-day workshop to train 27 youth to become teen leaders and peer educators at their Teen Club sites and in their communities. Topics covered were: problem solving, active listening, leadership styles, public speaking, expectations of Teen Leaders, and a plethora of health topics. Camper Recruitment and Preparations: For both the April and August 2012 camps, Ms. Crocker was solely responsible to orchestrate camper recruitment, plan caregiver information sessions, and ensure that all campers’ parental consent and medical forms were completed. A combined total of 172 youth attended these two camps from Baylor. Managing International Volunteers: Four different groups of three to five, young volunteers from the United Kingdom spent three months working at Baylor Clinic. Each group was Ms. Crocker’s responsibility to manage and supervise. She delegated tasks, organized work-loads, oversaw productivity, and provided learning opportunities for these young adults. Under her management, these volunteers worked on Teen Club tasks as well as accomplishing multiple secondary activities and projects. These included the development of a clinic library used to encourage good medication adherence in the youth. Another multi-group project completed personal story pamphlets, written by Teen Club youth, and anti-stigma lesson plans to accompany this tool for local schools. They were reviewed by the Ministry of Education. Daily Sunshine Club sessions, group activities for very young kids waiting to be seen by medical staff to dispel negative associations with healthcare seeking behaviors, were implemented, and this program was decentralized and expanded to Baylor’s two satellite clinics. Weekly, these volunteers would also be scheduled to help in the pharmacy, data room, and tidy the Teen Club supplies. Grant Proposals: During Ms. Crocker’s leadership of the Teen Club program, she worked on multiple successful grant proposals to sustain the adolescent PSS activities. Claypotts Trust, a local faith-based organization granted $20,625 (E165,000). ICAP, Columbia University’s international public health organization, awarded $24,025 (E192,200) for Teen Leadership Trainings and to hire a local, full-time Teen Club Coordinator to replace Ms. Crocker. UNICEF bestowed $19,194 (E153,550). President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) gave the flight, registration, and visa for the Swazi chaperone to attend the International AIDS Conference, at an estimated value of $3,385. Friends of Swaziland (FOS) returned Peace Corps Volunteer group approved a proposal for $511 to cover the remaining costs of the conference chaperone. Lastly, Ms. Crocker worked with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to secure a grant for $12,287 (E98,378) for the End of the Year Teen Club Event, which took place December 2011. Professional Presentations: During her time at Baylor, Ms. Crocker was requested to give a presentation on adolescent psychosocial support for youth living with HIV and another promoting volunteerism and community development to multiple groups of students at Waterford Kamhlaba – United World College of Southern Africa. She presented ways in which the Baylor clinic staff could utilize a newly developed, national HIV Prevention Toolkit on which she had been trained. Finally, Ms. Crocker was requested to present to Baylor’s organizational partners and stakeholders to describe and promote the program and alignment of similar initiatives. Teen Club Prospectus: Ms. Crocker wrote and formatted an updated program prospectus for Teen Club and other adolescent psychosocial support activities offered at the clinic. Organization of Network Drive: Six years worth of electronic Teen Club resources, documents, photographs, lesson plans, and tools were present on the clinic’s network drive. Ms. Crocker organized these items for easy access and use.