When talking about advocacy, I get serious. In fact, I’ve been getting a little too serious in general these past few days. It doesn’t help that last week I got sick and had a feverish feeling that part of my body had become the LURD fighters and was invading another part. Yeah. I’ve been reading too much about the Liberian war. If anyone can get me an electronic copy of Stephen Ellis’ most recent work on the war, that covers after 1999, that would be great. But I’ll be looking for it once I have internet access. This is another long three weeks without internet since a storm took out a piece of the dish and fried the router.

Seriously though, advocacy. I learned some techniques, specifically the DEN-L way, of course. “You have committed that you can be transformed” J.T. – at the first day of training. Mostly the ideas of Friere in action, like no education is neutral and how these theories apply to development and local advocacy. So a local group can encourage literacy while also discussing community problems and providing adult education on reproductive health (specifically since many women are illiterate).

So I know I dropped the ball on describing the DELTA training two weeks ago but this week I’m attending an adult literacy workshop to train community based literacy workers. Its run by the GAP team, or gender action program, since illiteracy is mostly, but not completely, gendered here. Of course it is, why do women need to go to school?