So...what is it you do at work?

After 3 weeks on the job, I feel that I am able to more fully answer that question...

As you all know, we work for MOUCECORE, an indigenous NGO who works on community development here in Rwanda. Their main problem is communication...telling the world, and especially their donors, what they do.

Enter the Interns. We all speak fairly good English (two of us having taken Advanced Grammar with Dr. Impson). We are here to help them communicate to an English Audience, explaining what they do, how they do it, and display some of their success. We began, as I mentioned, making promotional materials based off of interviews with the staff and looking over their current literature. We have a brochure that is not quite finished, that you can look at here, which will give you an idea of what they do, and how they accomplish the transformation of these people.

So we did that for the first week or so, then we visited some nearby villages. We will have visited about 5 when its all said and done, and we will use the information gathered to enrich the promotional materials as well as the website and show room. The last 2 weeks, when we haven't been in the field, we have been revamping their website. Their current one is not very informative or navigable, and so we are starting from scratch. It is looking very good, and we are all excited for it to go live. Now that we have finished our village visits we will be 'reporting.' We're not sure what that means, but we will be making some sort of report of the work in the places we have visited, featuring pictures, success stories, and details of how it all works.

The last thing we will do, once the reports are done, and the website finished, and the brochure, newsletter and flyer are off to the printer, we will make a show room. Again, not sure exactly what this will look like, but it will feature some of the print materials we have generated, as well as many pictures, and profiles of people they have helped.

So, it is a lot of communication related work, not actual development, which was different than I expected, but it is good, and of great assistance to them. It has also been very informative to us, and Conner and I are going to try to grab all the documents they have on their methods and process, and learn all we can.

So that is work at MOUCECORE. Sometimes is is frustratingly slow, and then sometimes it is awesome. We're glad we are here, and that we can help in this very practical way.