Remember when I was a statistician? (I can hardly remember how to spell statistician.)

Woah. I just got news from a former coworker from Medtronic that my old study has been published! I'm a published author! (The poor statistician whose been doing all the follow-up work since I left a year ago gets no credit at all, poor guy.) If you're interested, you can read the abstract.

Hands e-newsletter

Did we ever ask if you wanted to get Hands at Work e-newsletters? They come out about four times a year, and I think they're great! If you're interested, send an email to joinmailinglist@handsatwork.org.

Life skills

The good news is, this is the best training we've had yet from Peace Corps, and the Crocodile Inn (where we're doing training) is beautiful! We are being spoiled this week. The bad news is, the training would have been more interesting if we would have had it a year ago. Jed went to the mall tonight with a group of volunteers. He's catching up with our friend Joey, who moved sites a couple of months ago and is now so far away from Masoyi. It's great to catch up with others, too, like Abby, Craig and Rose. What a great bunch of people!

Building capacity, but mostly in ourselves

I had a bit of a realization today...it turns out Jed and I have learned something in the last year. We led a workshop and discussion on capacity building for new (and not-so-new) Hands at Work volunteers. I think we were chosen to lead it because Peace Corps calls us capacity builders. (You might think that means we learned about what it means to build capacity during our 8 weeks of Peace Corps training. Turns out, not so much. However, they did provide us with some awesome resources and toolkits, which is probably even better!)

Anyway, capacity building is something we talk about almost every day around here, so I thought it might be nice to share a bit about it with some of you at home. In the most basic terms, capacity building means coming alongside someone to help them. It's what Hands at Work does every day. (All of our projects are community-owned.) If I had to summarize the three most important things we talked about today, they are...

• Of all the roles we play as volunteers, the most important (and the most time-consuming) is the role of learner.
  
• "Thinking out loud" is a great way to build capacity.
  
• It's all about relationships. Ten years after we leave, people won't remember the projects we started, but if we do it right, they will remember how much we love them.

Things here are good. There was a second major transportation strike in South Africa on Wednesday. (When public transport shuts down, everything except our office shuts down.) It's good to see people taking a stand to peacefully protest rising food prices. I'm not so sure the message is getting through to the right people, but I hope it is.

Jed and I have a week of "life skills" training for Peace Corps next week. Fortunately, the training is being held close by, so we don't have to deal with a seven hour journey by taxi like we did for the last training. They've also invited us to bring a couple of people from our organization, which is great, because the guys leading the youth program and the young moms program in Masoyi have much more use for a training on life skills than I do.

I got a text message from Kim yesterday. They had just had dinner near the beach. And they learned a new card game called Piquet. Thought I'd pass on that tidbit. They're doing well.

More good news...Jed and I are planning a trip to Kabwe, Zambia in a couple of months. We will be visiting the Hands at Work service center there, to learn about what they're doing and see if we can build some capacity! Ha! We'll be there for at least a month, and we're terribly excited.

Have I reminded you lately to check out the Hands website? If it wasn't already clear, we love this organization, these people, and they way God is using them.

We're missing you all. Lately, we're missing Amanda especially. Who knew you could miss someone you hadn't even met so darn much?! This is our favorite photo, although it's over a month old now. (We get lots from Pam in the mail and from Jake and Sandy over email.) Isn't she beautiful?

As Auntie Debbie and Uncle Greg always say, take care of each other. We love you!

Brooke and Jed