Is that your final answer?

I may have mentioned that I was putting together a training needs analysis for our farmers. Basically, it's a survey that asks farmers about their understanding in a variety of areas. I surveyed three areas: production (the actual chicken-raising), business (budget, expenses, etc.), and association (work in their associations). Anyway, today was the day. I went with Bonisile, Pastor David, and Pastor Daniel up to the communities. They were very cooperative and helpful, and we got a lot of good information. The others actually administered the survey; because I am far from fluent in SiSwati, I took pictures. Got a lot of good pictures and some video too.

The surveys were supposed to clarify the needs of the communities. This will help us write our grant and also help us as we work on training them. Unfortunately, the new clarity revealed a complicated situation. Myoloza is doing fine with production, but their association is very poor. Trust in the association is low and there is a very low degree of ownership within the project. Lamgabi is just starting to do production, so there were some low degrees of knowledge there, but I am confident those will change to aptitudes as they work with their chickens and Pastor Daniel helps them. They also requested a lot of business training. So I'm already thinking about how we can do that.

All in all, the day was very productive and I'm happy about the work that we did. Now I've got to work on my formal report for Tinashe, which I'm also looking forward to. Pictures will be available Monday.

Being busy is good.

-Ben

P.S. Two news articles of interest. GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has settled with the US government for $3,000,000,000. Its crime was marketing drugs for unapproved uses. This is the kind of thing that I worked on when I was in the DOJ: Consumer Protection Branch, and it's a safe bet that some of my former coworkers were involved in this. Note: The Civil Division of the DOJ has a budget of about $283 million, meaning this settlement would cover their budget for the next decade. But don't let their noble and lucrative work fool you, they too are in danger of having their budget further slashed. It has already been cut this year. Sorry for getting political there, I just have trouble controlling myself when common sense and passion align.

The other article ran in the Swazi Times about the lawyers protesting. They got shut out of the courthouse, so instead they tried to march. The police stopped them marching, so they got in their cars and ran the lines (I'm probably making it more dramatic than it was). Anyway, they ended up at the restaurant in our building. Didn't majorly affect my life, but our building got mentioned in the paper. (For reference, our building hosts 5-6 businesses including the restaurant.) You can read the article here.