on kony 2012

Update 10 March 2012
I've done a little more looking over the past day or two and have found some better sources of information. Those that are friends or followers may have already seen me post this elsewhere. Unfortunately, it seems like all the information people are referencing at the moment is from op-ed news articles which, while they do include some relevant information, are generally only talking about people's reactions to the video and their opinions of Invisible Children. While that's all fine, I'm not looking for opinions and what people think about what's going on in Africa. What I'm looking for are the unabashed facts; what is actually happening on the ground in the Congo/CAR/South Sudan, what does Invisible Children and Co. want to accomplish, how do they want to go about it, and what kind of data do they have to back up their claims (i.e. the LRA is alive and dangerous).

shika isn't dead

No really, Shika hasn't kicked the bucket. But I'll be the first to admit things have stagnated a bit in terms of getting new people to maintain the book and keep it fresh. Though I'm working on a big fancy USAID project now, I'm still a Peace Corps Volunteer, and as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I like to keep my hands in things that other Peace Corps Volunteers are doing (or at least should be doing). Things like hands-on science!

In the past few days, I've been buckling down to get some documentation together for people who want to help us edit and write new content for the manual. My original idea of whipping up a few wiki pages with dry instructions, however, has suddenly blossomed into the desire to write a veritable handbook, complete with diagrams, graphs (I love graphs!), and of course...

"The width of the planting bed should be approximately one  yaNYANYANYANYA!"

financial findings on the first of the month

The saga of graphs continues! Today is the 1st of the month, which is an exciting day for me; it's the day that my finance management application spits out monthly reports, outlining fun things like "top variations in spending" and generating sweet graphs to show income vs. expenditure. It's so wonderful when you can enter such simple information into a program and it shows you a thousand ways to look at it.

Much akin to how politicians sometimes release their tax returns during election season, I've decided to open a small window into the financial world of the Peace Corps Volunteer, albeit my status as an extendee on a USAID project skews the data a bit. Below is my financial summary for the month of February.