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Hari Om

First I will give you a little background of C.O.R.D, (Chinmaya Organization for Rural Development) the place I am doing the internship. The department of CORD I am working for is located in the state of Himachal Pradesh near the small village of Sidhbari, at the foothills of the Himalayas. ...

Reflections on Poverty, Pollution and swelling car Population in Nairobi

September 26 2009 I've been in Nairobi for almost three weeks now, but this is my first blog entry with SFD. You can check out my earlier reflections on my university blog, under Kenya: http://web5.uottawa.ca/ssms/blogs/international/category/kenya/ So far I’ve found my stay in Nairobi very comfortable and enjoyable. The family hosting me ...

Beautiful Sunyani

Hi Everyone, I wanted to post an introductory message from Sunyani, Brong Ahafo Region, Ghana. I am here helping with Agroforestry to Enhance Resource-Poor Livelihoods (APERL) project. This is a CIDA Tier 1 project that is a collaboration between the University of Guelph and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science ...

Insights into Policy-making in Jamaica

I am a Master of Science in Planning candidate at the University of Toronto with an interest in entrepreneurial and business approaches to environmental stewardship.  My research interest in investigating the role of ecosystem service markets, such as carbon markets, in Caribbean tourism planning led to me to pursue a ...

Because giraffes

It must be some very strange, double-edged curse, but Rwanda is most definitely enchanted. The whole of the country is tiny, and full of bizarre and wonderful things… - In the middle of the country, a bustling city in the chaoatic throes of development - In the Southwest, a rainforest, which is ...

Capacity Building

The English lessons, yoga classes, workshops and counseling sessions have all been wonderful ways for me to get to know the beneficiaries, as well as to help them in concrete ways. But most of my time here is spent in the Association’s office, where I have been working helping the ...

The workshops and the counseling

Health Workshops [caption id="attachment_421" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Participants in a first aid workshop study anatomy diagrams"][/caption] For the past few weeks, I have been assisting a volunteer, who is a retired nurse, with workshops on a range of health topics. She has been running ...

yoga classes in Rwanda

[caption id="attachment_417" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="me, waiting for yoga class to begin"][/caption] I trained as a yoga instructor in Canada about a year ago, but only ever taught sporadically there, mostly because I was too busy with work and ...

starting with zero…

I came here to assist the Tubahumurize Association, a relatively young NGO based in the neighbourhood of Kabeza, Kigali. The Association’s mission is to support and empower women victims of violence living in Rwanda. Tubahumurize serves socially and economically marginalized women living in this country, regardless of their age, ethnicity, nationality, ...

The Kigali dust begins to settle

[caption id="attachment_407" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Kigali looks like this"][/caption] I have been working at the Tubahumurize Association in Kigali, Rwanda for two months now. Looking back on my time here so far, I am amazed by how much I have learned and ...