Christy in Namibia - Peace Corps

Let me start off with an apology, as is the norm with my posts. This one is a bit more delayed than most... As I mentioned, my parents came to visit Namibia back in January; however, while recently checking through old posts, I realized that I never actually uploaded the post I wrote about their visit to my blog! I wrote it in a word doc on my computer and forgot to upload once the wifi was back up again. So, here's a post I wrote in January about my parents' visit :) I hope you enjoy! *** Alas, onto the final leg of our holiday travels and the final blog post about them! After our fantastic time with the whole family in SA, my parents and I headed up to Namibia for them to see my beautiful host country. Another big plus was that my host family from training was able to join us for most of the trip as well! We flew into Windhoek on the evening of New Year’s Day and hopped in our rental car after a slow start on the morning on the 2 nd . First up: Sossusvlei. The larges...

Hello all! Hopefully you had a chance to check out my last post all about Serve 2 Lead. This week's post (yes, I'm posting two consecutive weeks!) is about the next youth development project that I have coming up. As you may remember from last year, I am a camp facilitator for Camp GLOW (Girls and Guys Leading our World), which takes place each August in Windhoek. It's a week-long camp for 44 Namibian school children from all regions to develop their leadership, communication, empathy, and teamwork skills. It also focuses on breaking down the gender norms and tribalism that is very present in Namibian society. The camp is completely free for learners, so that cost won't prevent them from gaining a life-changing experience. Most of the kids who attend camp are categorized as "Orphans or Vulnerable Children." Our fundraising page was recently posted, so if you're interested in making a difference in a child's life and development & supporting our...

Happy Friday, blog readers! I'm so excited to tell you all about Serve 2 Lead (S2L), a leadership development program that I've been a part of for the past 9 months or so. I talked about it a bit in my last post entitled "Time Flies", but I'll give a quick recap here in case you missed the last post. In November last year, a team of fellow PCVs and I met with many local stakeholders, including representatives from local schools, the Ministry of Gender, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Health, and the Vocational Training Center. Together, we brainstormed areas where youth in our region are lacking skills. Two of the largest needs that we came up with were leadership skills and entrepreneurship/creative thinking skills. After this meeting, my good friend and fellow PCV Mandeep came up with two program ideas targeting this need. He reached out to the PCV community in our region to see if anyone was interested in developing the programs. I jumped on the oppor...