SPA Grant Proposal Approved!

SPA, or Small Project Assistance, is a grant available to Peace Corps volunteers. Seems pretty simple: come up with an awesome, sustainable project that addresses a community needs, gain community support, write up a grant, present the proposal, and waaala… money in da bank. What’s not to love…?

Well, I tell ya. 

Seventeen pages of Spanish essays and graphs, countless drafts, trying (fairly unsuccessfully) to get people at my school to help me write it, a presentation in front of PC Colombia staff, re-writing essays in English, getting a new bank account, and on and on and on… it wasn’t so simple. Furthermore, being the “guiney-pig” is never easy and as the first volunteer to apply for and receive a SPA grant in Colombia since the program reopened, it has been a learning process for the office staff as well as me, note the extra re-writes/corrections and last minute details or trips to Barranquilla.

But, needless to say, it is FINISHED! Kaput! Chicas Lideres INEDSORistas, a girls empowerment and leadership project in my school/neighborhood, has been going on since May, 2012, but it is about to get a new makeover with the couple thousand dollars we now have thanks to the SPA grant and community contribution. I couldn't be more pumped about the need and potential for a program like this! 

We plan to start next school year, so end of January 2013 with 20-25 girls from 10^th and 11^th grade (the oldest students). We will continue learning about topics regarding sexual, emotional, and physical health every week for two hours. Now, in addition, we will be bring in professionals to talk to the girls about their jobs, thus hopefully opening the girls' minds to career possibilities other than what they know: selling phone minutes on the street, making empanadas, or unemployment, for example. Furthermore, we will bring them to universities and help them to understand the application process and eventually to apply. Finally, the girls will analyze their school and neighborhood’s’ needs and, with our help, design community service projects that they will later and carry-out in the school and outside in their neighborhoods.

On a final note: to end this school year, the girls presented to all of 10^th grade (about 230 students) about HIV/AIDS prevention. It takes guts to put a condom on a dildo in front of all of your classmates, and they did it, not only with confidence, but correctly! I’m so proud. Amazing girls.