Email #5 "Joyous June!"
Hello all! I hope that the month of June has found you all in good health and good spirits! As for me, I've been doing well. I finally developed 4 rolls of film from the first three months here and have sent the negatives home, and Joscelyn (Webmaster's NOTE: That's me!) is planning on making a web page with it..... so you can all check out Erin's adventures in Africa.

My village is treating me well, although they are a little overzealous to get some projects started, and I really just need to settle in and get used to my new life. Not to mention that new volunteers aren't allowed to apply for funding for the first 3 months. I've been able to attend classes at the school, go work in the fields with some friends, ride my bike down dirt paths through banana tree fields in the sunset........ the countryside around my village is really breathtaking, not to mention the clouds. Sometimes I actually forget where I am, because really life isn't all that different. The differences seem to lie in the subtle things, because the big changes are things I've already gotten used to. Does that make any sense? People sweeping the dirt in front of their houses, women cooking on open fires, children with tops on and no bottoms (so much for potty training....they just go wherever they are!), women with no shirts at all...... and I just sit with my friends and we talk. It seems so normal. Then I'll look over and see some kind of crazy exotic bird circling a patch of jungle-like trees...... and I remember I'm in Africa.

But then there are the other details of my job and being here, the most popular topic right now being AIDS, as you all know. Some good friends of mine, the FoxWhites (He's Tim White and she's Alexandra Fox, so they got married and became FoxWhites.... I think that's a great way to do it!) anyway, they are two of the volunteers on the AIDS committee here and were working on an AIDS action pack for each volunteer: to be used at our sites for sensibilizations; learning how to talk to people about AIDS in a society where they don't even talk about sex (even though it's obviously happening all of the time); how to teach girls that, for their own safety, they need to ask boys to wear condoms; to teach men that there's no masculinity lost in WEARING condoms; the basic necessities that a development volunteer working in africa should have. So they got some great ideas together and were planning on presenting it at the all-volunteer AIDS conference that we're supposed to be having in August. They presented it to the directors here, and, wouldn't ya know, come to find out that the only reason they were even working on it was so that our office can show the ideas to Washington (our main headquarters - everything goes back to them) and let Washington know that "we're on top of AIDS". But they WILL NOT allocate money to provide these packs to the volunteers, nor do they want Alex and Tim to discuss it. It also turns out that the ALLVOL conference (specifically funded by DC as an AIDS conference) will now have one session and one session only regarding AIDS.

Just a small example of the beauty of the bureaucracy that we get to deal with. One would think that, with it being such a big international topic right now and such a serious crisis in this region, that a group like the Peace Corps would strive to try and make a difference. Alex and I were talking about co-authoring an article about how difficult it has been trying to get funding and support for AIDS topics from our government and our employers, but our contract being such as it is, we would have to wait two years to be allowed to do that. At least we the volunteers are the ones that go out and make the changes, and even though we'll end up paying for it out of our own pockets, we're all still willing to do as much as we can.

Sorry to be such a bummer, guys! And no matter how crazy the red tape gets, we all have each other to keep us sane. On that note, I think I need an ice cream. Write to me! Email me! I miss you all. But time is going quickly, and despite the depressing nature of this email, I'm quite happy and relatively healthy.

MOM AND DAD (and anyone else feeling adventurous) I'll be at the hostel in Abidjan tonite (6/4) and tomorrow nite (6/5) and the phone number is......22.41.52.61..........gimme a ring!

Peace out. Love, Erin

Erin Hereford
Corps de la Paix
BP 2579
Daloa
Cote d'Ivoire