peace lacks novelty

I decided that an update for y’all on the work front here in Liberia is long overdue. As you might recall, I didn’t move to Liberia to simply be traumatized by giant insects, contract unknown intestinal disorders and develop an obsession with Aunt Jemima! In fact, I came here to work (volunteer full-time in an unpaid capacity technically) and the task at hand is something that I am very committed to. The scheduled dates for our upcoming Liberian Peace & Cultural Festival are approaching quite rapidly (we’re 6 weeks out) and there are many things still left to be done. The Festival will take place the last week of February and consists of workshops for youth and three nights of musical performances, each featuring different genres. The funny thing is that in the last month alone we’ve seen two other organizations present ‘peace festivals’ at the same venue that we’re planning to hold ours. So the challenge has become to do it better than everybody else! We were fortunate to attend portions of each of the recent festivals and have learned a lot from the mistakes of others. Right now our biggest delay has come from the slowness that we’re experiencing in securing sponsors. Most companies that we approached loved the description of what we’re planning but despite our fundraising assault, which started in the last week of November, we are still waiting. We’re still very optimistic – all though the lack of funding has been freaking out my American brain for months (since I was in Scotland!), I’ve settled into the fact that there’s no need for a breakdown just yet, afterall we’re on West African time!

Today we had a very productive staff meeting and talked through a strategic plan of sorts for 2008. Taking into consideration a list (created several months ago) of a lot of very optimistic dream projects, we were eventually able to narrow it down into something realistic and accomplishable given where AYDAP stands at this moment as a grassroots NGO. After this meeting I’m actually very eager for the Festival to come and go so that we can really hit the ground running with our other planned projects!