Getting Up-to-Date

So, a lot has happened since my last decent update, when…*ahem*…somewhere around January I was writing a grant, asking FSD to fund an adaptation of the Celebrating Families program, here at El Bohío. Here’s a summary of the last three months (hopefully I’ll get a chance to fill in the details shortly…):

The waiting game

I submitted my grant—typically they take a week to get approved/rejected. Mine took 5 weeks! They wanted me to rewrite a few parts, but decided that one of the San Francisco based directors should tell me this, since she would be visiting. I’m all about personal touches, but in this case, I had to wait for her to arrive, wait for her to have time to meet, and then do a fairly simple/straightforward rewrite and re-submit it, adding another week to the delay…

Pretending to be useful

While I waited, I had little to do in the office—the first week was fine, after that, I was searching for anything I could find to do—filing, scrubbing the floors, cleaning vegetables. It was a difficult time to motivate myself to go to work.

Approval!

Finally, the grant was approved, and everything took off! Since then, things have been rolling

along very smoothly, and I’ve been keeping really busy, but in the best way…

I prepared a 3-hour training for the El Bohío staff in the CF! Curriculum. Up until this point, the director had a certain amount of blind confidence in the program and my support of it. My job was then to teach them about it, and sell it, so that it would be kept as close to its original form as possible. Luckily, I got support just in time (see below), and the training was a huge success. Everyone is thrilled to be a part of the workshops!

U.S.-Argentine collaboration

The delay in getting my grant written before January was the wait for the translation of the CF curriculum. Finally, I decided we would wing it with my rough translation and the staff’s expertise. However, when I contacted the CF director in San José, she noted my timing was perfect. The translation was 70% complete. The missing section was the adolescent piece, which I should easily be able to translate using the parent text as a guide. On the published text, I’ll be noted as a translator, and El Bohío will be acknowledged as a pilot site. We signed on the dotted line, creating a partnership the president of El Bohío has been looking for since the beginning. Meanwhile, I’ll have some nice filler on my resume for this crazy year!