Castellón, España- May 4, 2004
Time is really getting away from me. Didn´t realize its already been over a week since the last journal entry. Well, we finished the first two weeks of Intro to Peace and Development Studies. Basically we reviewed the history of development. How the developed world decided to develop the underdeveloped world and what kinds of things they learned from doing. How many times they weren´t successful but sometimes they were. How it continues to work today with non-governmental agencies and all the rest. Quite interesting. We had various local professors from the city of Alicante who came up to teach the course. Now I have a course paper to do about what I learned and to sum everything up.
Castellón is going well. Its been raining and very cloudy the last few days. I wanted to enjoy my 3-day weekend but it rained so much that I couldn´t get out of the apartment. I did get to the library though to check out a few books on development. Oddly the library is closed at 3pm, but its okay, I got up early enough to do that.
Today we just started on a new 3-week course with a new professor. She is also from Spain. She is teaching ´Planning, Management, and Evaluation of Development Co-operation Projects´. Basically its what it says. Should be very interesting and very essential if someday I want to do something like that myself. Most people in our graduate program selected this class as well. The alternative was a course about Development and India. It also could have been interesting, but this one just seems so much more practical. So I signed up for this along with 23 other students.
Tonight for reading, I´ll be reading about street children in St. Petersburg, Russia. We have a group who will probably be setting up our own projects in this regard (for studying purposes). It should be interesting. We divided the class into four groups. Two on Russian streetchildren, and two on AIDS in Zanzibar. Both could be interesting. But I was thinking about the 1000s of street children I saw everywhere in Brazil when I was down there teaching English years ago (1997-1998) and to a lesser extent the many street kids I saw in Cambodia and Vietnam. But Brazil there were tons. Just packs of kids, often they´d steal or do other things. No other livelihood. So reading about the Russian streetkids in St. Petersburg should be interesting as well. We´ll see as this course progresses.
This entire graduate program is going to go quickly!! My general plan is one semester here in Spain, then the Summer semester in Austria, and then back to Spain for the last and final semester. Then its tiem to do a thesis this coming Winter and I´ll have a masters degree in Peace and Development. All things are going as planned so far.. should be an interesting 2004 and an even interesting 2005 as I´ll have the tools to do something a bit different and interesting with my life (hopefully) in the coming years.
Next Journal Entry in Spain:
May 11, 2004
You can email me at:
Wintermoon2@yahoo.com