Visits

June 9th
First off, today is my birthday! Yeeaah!  Okay, enough of that celebratory mood.  ;-)

Today we visited a non-profit called PATH, though I don't know what it stands for, if anything.  Even their website doesn't say.  Either way, someone recommended that we meet with them to discuss any mutual beneficial activities or meetings or at least just to start getting to know each other.  After visiting PATH we went down to a local hospital which works with PATH.  I didn't write down very many details of these two encounters.  The hospital was nice in trying to cater towards lower income people, but I remember now being all that impressed with PATH.  It just reminded me of a some of the US over funded, under active non-profits where most money goes into bureaucracy, salaries, and nice office space.  It's why you have to be careful where your money goes, if it goes to charity.  We also checked out a related "youth center" which was really more of a small office space that was directed at teaching youth about AIDs and "proper" sexual things.  Basically trying to teach kids about sex and condoms and how sex "causes" AIDs.  Again, none of us were really impressed though I appreciate what they are attempting to do but considering all the money spent in advertising I don't know if anyone is left who doesn't know about AIDs, at least anyone who can read.

Later in the evening we did more microfinance interviews in Kathy and Cindi's apartment, this time with the Board and those who work with the microfinance group.  The power went out, again, within 10 minutes of us being finished (I think), so timing was utterly perfect.  It can be quite difficult to film in the dark naturally so we were all glad that we got everything we needed.  At this point we ate dinner and had a candle pow wow.

Correction: We did not do microfinance interviews in Kathy and Cindi's room tonight.  That was the next night.  The power went off both nights though if I recall correctly.  Either that or the power went off tonight, and came back on the next day just as the sun was going down while doing the interviews so the timing was perfect.  I think that was it.  I didn't record that information unfortunately.  So this night we just had a candle pow wow in their room as a team.