"Do not go where the path may lead..."

A few months ago, we started building our first four composting latrines in my community and the rest of my community started clamoring for the health seminar I told them they had to attend in order to enter the project. The earliest I could get it scheduled was March 6-8, working around the schedules of the other Volunteers I needed to come help do it, the time I needed to create and prepare the seminar, and the other events going on in Panama like GAD Camp and my Field IST. I asked each of the 4 Volunteers coming to help with my seminar to design a workshop around one of the four topics I focused my seminar on: handwashing, clean water, composting latrines, and household cleanliness. I sent them notes I took from the books Switch (see behavior change blog) and Made to Stick (see sticky ideas blog). I did NOT want to make my seminar a series of lectures with half the audience asleep and the other half picking at bug bites. I wanted it to be 3 days of activities where they wer...

This is the other game changing book I read by the brothers Chip and Dan Heath, Made to Stick. Every artist, designer, teacher, advertiser, promotor, and person that has an idea they want someone else to remember should read it. However, until you have the time to sit down and enjoy it, here's my jungle cliff notes. This was the original inspiration for my health seminar. What is a sticky idea? To summarize a 300 page book, successful ideas consistantly follow a pattern: SIMPLE UNEXPECTED CONCRETE CREDENTIALED EMOTIONAL STORY But first, you need a mission. You need to know where you are going. You need something to grt you from square 1 to the finish line. But life is unpredictable and you don't know what is going to happen in the middle. Entonces, the commander's intent. 'No plan survives contact with the enemy,' some military guy said, and so they use a COMMANDER'S INTENT, a 'crisp plain-talk statement specifying the plan's...

A lot of non-Volunteers ask me, "Do you ever get homesick?" when they find out that I am here for 27 months. I always want to reply with, "Do you ever poop?" because it seems to me to be appropriate response. I have not lost all of my tact however, and have not said that. Yet. We are Peace Corps Volunteers, not aliens. Of course we get homesick sometimes. If one goes away for a week on a business trip, a mission trip, or to summer camp, the stories about being homesick and missing one's family abound. Every year during the holiday season hundreds of commercials, movies, and advertisements flood the media with different variations of the same story: a homesick soldier overseas on Christmas Eve receiving whatever product they want you to buy in a care package from home. But PCV's? Nah, we don't get homesick. This post goes out to all those aspiring Volunteers out there. You WILL be homesick. You are a heartless, unattached soul incapable of feelin...

No, it wasn't Giardia. I mean, it was. I did have giardia, but that didn't create a major change in my weight. Stomach illnesses aren't the hardest part of a Volunteer's job. The hardest part of my job is the same challenge presented to any overweight person, alcoholic, oversleeper, compulsive liar, smoker, or obsessive hoarder. It is the hardest part of the job for any corporate manager or supervisor or therapist or parent. Creating behavior change. A Volunteer can build as many latrines as he or she wants, but if at the end of the day they become glorified storage closets and the people continue using the river, what was the point? You have to get them to make the SWITCH. I read a book, ergo I am now a behavior change expert, clearly. (Not sure if the sarcasm came through strong enough in that sentence.) The book, from which I will quote unabashedly without proper citations throughout the rest of this post, is called Switch, written by brothers Chip and Dan H...