Ghana

Welp, I'm now facing the fact that I'll never really do a deep and dirty blog post about my Ghana travels. It's hard to believe I was gone almost a month. Yet, I have pictures to document only a fraction of it. I only whipped my camera out periodically, regardless of how meaningful the moments were. I have more from our group picture compilation, but for now it doesn't matter.

Anyway, I had an amazing time! We gathered good information from our interviews with market queens. We also interviewed a lot of borrowers of the LDS Perpetual Education Fund to discover what changes could be made to improve the PEF program in Ghana. In our time outside of those endeavors, we visited many organizations, took in a lot of rich culture... and bacteria, made wonderful friends, and visited some beautiful areas. It was refreshing to be out of class, yet still working at something that I care about while soaking in the energy of Africa. Check out this album of pictures from my trip. I wrote captions for almost all of them.

Ghana 2010

During the trip, I interviewed for and received an offer for an internship with Millennium Challenge Corporation, headquartered in Wash DC. I'll be interning in the Monitoring & Evaluation department, which is more than I could've asked for in a summer internship. So far I'm impressed with MCC,it was my first choice for interning and future employment. It's a relatively new government agency focused on long-term international development projects established in U.S.-to-recipient country contracts. A recipient country must meet certain criteria (of governance, public policies, stability, good outlook of development investment, etc) to qualify for a contract, or "compact" as they're called. Also, the recipient country must own its own projects and be accountable for all follow-through of funding allocation and project implementation. Anyway, I'll be leaving in a week to start in DC. Wish me luck!