My office has a women’s medical clinic on the first floor.  All services are complimentary, which I think is pretty stellar for this part of the country and incredibly important for women in the region.  I’m raising money to help my office buy new medical equipment for the clinic, and I hope you’ll watch the video below (or on YouTube) and consider helping.

Since I arrived in July of 2010 (wow, I’ve been here for a long time!) the clinic has offered gynecological services, including pelvic exams and contraception, for free.  Last year, we acquired a mammogram machine from an American donor and we now offer breast and cervical cancer screening – again, complimentary – through the Georgian government’s National Screening Center.  We have a laboratory and try to do as much work in-house as possible to lower our costs.

What’s so important about the work of the clinic is that it provides preventative care.  It’s often said that women here go to the doctor twice in their lives:  to deliver a baby and when a problem becomes too big to ignore.  I can say, anecdotally, that this is entirely true.  Our office is working to encourage annual screenings and check-ups so issues can be detected and dealt with before they reach the crisis stage.

Best of all, these preventative care services are free.  I’ve talked about unemployment and the incredibly challenging economic situation here.  Medical care is expensive, and while our doctor friend will occasionally accept pumpkins for payment, hospitals aren’t so flexible.  Health care, especially for the female caregivers in the family, often falls to the bottom of the list of priorities.

The project I’ve written would help our medical staff so much.  Our laboratory technician would have new slides, syringes and shipping containers.  (Currently, to send a specimen or sample to Tbilisi, she wraps the slides in paper and hopes for the best, so you can imagine how many are contaminated, lost, broken, etc.  Plus, the equipment she has is really, really old.)  Our doctor would have a new sterilzing machine, so she could see more patients every day.  Currently, patients must wait for her to clean equipment between appointments.  Our mammogram technician would have a new table where she could develop and read the mammogram films, cutting response time from one month to ten days.  The doctors told me that with these upgrades, they can see 40% more women each month.

Sean filmed me giving a short tour of our clinic, so you can see our space and meet our doctors and technicians.  I hope you’ll watch.  But before I send you there, I wanted to include a few statistics about women’s health in Georgia:

• Breast cancer is the leading cause of death among Georgian women aged 14-49.
• In 2009, 61% of cervical cancer cases and 58% of breast cancer cases were discovered in Stage 3 or 4.
• Georgia has the highest rate of abortions in the region, at 3.1 abortions per woman.
• Only 16% of Georgian women use modern contraceptives.

Below is the video tour of our clinic that Sean put together for me.  (Please excuse my crazy facial expressions.  I had no idea I was, well, so expressive.)

I hope that no one reading this will feel pressured or obliged to donate.  However, if you do feel compelled to support my work here, and the efforts of the doctors and medical professionals in our clinic, I would be incredibly appreciative of your support, as would all my co-workers.  Thank you in advance.

If you do choose to donate, you can do so here.  My project is called “Preventative Health Care for Women:  Improving Access and Quality.”

Finally, a big thanks to my mom, who helped me decipher all the technical medical language necessary to write this project.  (For fun, you can imagine me, in my limited Georgian, talking to my director and trying to understand what exactly these pieces of equipment do.  There was lots of breast-squeezing and drawing of ovaries, to be sure!)

Outside of writing what felt like writing a ba-jillion grants in January (actual count: four), I spent a lot of work-time preparing for my committee’s ToT conference.

For this year's conference, we eliminated all the handouts and created a workbook (translated into Georgian, of course) for the participants to use throughout the sessions and as a reference for future use.

I’m on Peace Corps Georgia’s health committee and I feel like we do a lot throughout the year.  We develop and promote resources for volunteers and Georgians to promote health; we raise awareness for the need for health education across the country; we do whatever we can to help volunteers and their communities implement health projects.  However, the ToT has to be one of our biggest projects:  a two-day conference for interested volunteers and their counterparts.  We talk about the Life Skills model, HIV/AIDS transmission and Georgia-specific information (which is quite interesting, by the way), Behavior Change Communication theory, project design and management, funding sources…you get the idea.  We pack a lot in to two days.

Melissa and I hawking the Life Skills goods (activity books, lecture series DVDs and companion guides, reference books, brochures...) the day before the conference.

While I was a part of putting on this conference last year, I was so new to the committee that I didn’t do much besides prepare and give my presentations; however, this year was a lot more work and responsibility.  And thankfully, I’ve met my organized-to-the-point-of-ridiculousness match in Melissa, my friend and fellow G10 member of the committee.  Additionally, the committee took on three new G11 members in November and our newbies did an awesome job of jumping in and taking ownership over their sessions.

Connie introducing the Health Education Lecture Series DVD and Companion Guide, a resource we developed last year that has presentations in Georgian by Georgian doctors on a variety of health-related topics.

What I didn’t mention is that this conference was held in Bazaleti, resort area next to a lake in the mountains north of Tbilisi.  This area – as well as all of Georgia and most of Europe, you might have heard – has gotten lots of snow as of late.  So while it’s beautiful, transportation was a bit of a problem.

The gorgeous, but frozen, Bazaleti Lake. Our first day here was incredibly windy and snowy, and I woke up at four a.m. wondering if we were being bombed by the Russians. Thankfully that wasn't the case, but in our fourth-floor room it sounded like someone was twisting a huge baking sheet outside our window.

On the first morning of the conference, we were without our staff liaison, who was scheduled to open the conference; our translators, who are pretty important considering half the room spoke Georgian or Russian; and our Georgian HIV/AIDS expert speaker.  Most of these poor people were stuck in a snowbank halfway between Tbilisi and Bazaleti.  So after a few minutes of minor internal panic, we managed and only pushed the schedule back by 30 minutes.  Win!

Melissa stepped in as the "expert" speaker for our HIV/AIDS in Georgia presentation (and rocked it!). There is no formalized health education in schools - although it's coming - so she spent a lot of time de-bunking myths about how you can and can't get HIV.

The rest of the conference went smoothly.  Of course, it wouldn’t be a Peace Corps conference without games to stimulate discussion…

Poor Jack was our "rat" for the activity and discussion about stigma and discrimination.

…and small group work…

A table of volunteers and counterparts discussing factors that promote and inhibit behavior change (and yes, the girl in the peach is our host sister - she came as the counterpart of another volunteer in town!).

…and lots and lots of flipcharts.

Small groups created and shared session plans on different health topics so all participants would have activities for their classrooms, organizations and various groups back home.

Probably most exciting about this conference is that all participants left with an idea for a health project they could implement, together with their counterparts, in their communities.  Some groups got farther than others in developing their projects, but it’s a great start nonetheless.  We can’t wait to see how these ideas are expanded or changed over time and which projects will be implemented.

Ariana, Abby and their counterpart are planning a campaign to get their high school kids to drink more water.

Jana and her incredibly sweet counterpart want to start a women's health and fitness club in their town.

My friend Amy and her counterpart are planning trainings and activities using the committee's resources, as well as some hikes and other outdoorsy stuff.

We’re really happy with the conference.  It is a training of trainers – meaning that our goal was to empower our attendees to leave with the knowledge, skills and attitudes (to borrow a well-used Peace Corps phrase) to become trainers and health promoters in their own right back at site.  Hearing that others, counterparts and volunteers alike, left motivated and excited to do just that made all our hours of working and planning completely worth it.  I even had a volunteer tell me that the conference completely changed her plans for what she wanted to accomplish in her community.  Wow!

This last picture is my favorite of the entire conference:  our committee, along with our staff liaison, Teo, took a “victory picture” after the room cleared out on the last day.  Thanks to everyone on our awesome committee for pulling off such a great conference.  I’m proud of us!

We did it! Jason, Jana, Teo, Melissa, Connie and me.

I’m happy to report that a few of my projects from last fall have wrapped up – and I have printed materials to prove it!

Remember the marketing project I designed for my co-workers?  The one where we learned about target markets and developing promotional messaging?  And they had to create their own marketing campaigns?  Well, even if it didn’t go exactly as planned, it still went.  And now we have colored brochures and flyers for every program and service we offer that they’ll use for years to come.  Win!

The best part about all this is that my co-workers designed these materials, so they can update and reprint as needed.

In all seriousness, I’m really happy with how this project turned out, as are my co-workers.  I’m not sure they’ve drastically changed their promotional strategies or if lots more new people are utilizing our programs and services now, but I do know that my co-workers realize that they don’t need to hire an expert to solve their problems; they can at least try to tackle them on their own.

Back in September, I mentioned that health-inspired art competitions for kids were being held across Georgia, using my committee’s Health Education Lecture Series DVD.  (Ours in Akhaltsikhe covered reproductive health, if that rings a bell.)  A friend and I chose the best 13 pieces of artwork for inclusion in the 2012 Healthy Living Art Calendar.

Now, picture Sean and me taking numerous trips to visit a graphic designer in Tbilisi and attempting to explain and critique various drafts of this calendar, all in Georgian.  Are you laughing yet?  Actually, our designer was spectacular and very patient with me pointing at the screen and saying simple, likely grammatically-incorrect things in Georgian such as, “I want this more bigger!” and “Too much blue, red better I think!”

And, best of all, the calendars are fantastic!

Bright and colorful, just like a kids' art calendar should be!

May's Tobacco Awareness art was the most artistic of the bunch...

...but my personal favorite is the art for November, Men's Health. (Also in this picture you can see the quick facts we listed at the bottom, which pertain to that month's theme.)

Finally, I’ve mentioned a few times that the grant my director and I wrote to the US Embassy last year was funded.  We’ve been implementing this project since July, and as a part of the outreach for the Women’s Democracy School and Information Center we created a website, and now a booklet.  Granted, these things were supposed to be done in September, but what can you do?

The booklet contains simplified descriptions of Georgian laws that impact women (domestic violence, gender equality and human trafficking) so they are more aware of their rights.

For some reason, almost all the pictures of people in this booklet are my co-workers or part of my director's extended family. The bottom picture, for example, is my director's daughter and sister. I'm only featured in one, with my friend and former volunteer Martyna, looking bored out of my mind. Of all the pictures!

It feels good to wrap up some of these projects, like I can put a big check mark in the “Accomplished!” box.  And these accomplishments, regardless of how successful (or unsuccessful) they were, give me momentum and confidence to try to get a few more checks before we leave.  Onward!