A little background

Hi friends!

So as you probably already know (since you're reading this) I'm headed to Juba, South Sudan for the summer (June 17-August 25) for an internship that will be focused on conducting a survey of gender-based violence services in Central Equatoria State.  Centra Equatoria State (CES) is one of ten states within South Sudan, and contains the capital city of Juba where I'll be based.  I will be working with an NGO on the ground that is acting as my home base while I work with the CES Ministry of Gender and Social Policy to work on creating a comprehensive listing of all the service providers that survivors of gender-based violence access within CES.

I've been told I'll be working with two social workers from the Ministry and we'll be working throughout CES surveying service providers and local communities to see what services exist, what gaps there are, and also the level of effectiveness of services providers.  There are a wide variety of topics that the surveys I'm working on designing will encompass and I'm sure I'll explain them in depth later on as the project starts.

The internship is a part of a class I took last semester, which has as a part of it's curricula "reflective practice" which requires us to reflect on the underlying assumptions we are making as we work through our internships.  It hopefully keeps us focused, aware of our actions and their impacts, as well as making sure we don't fall into the trap of assuming the path we are on is necessarily correct. I'm hoping this blog will be a part of that practice, so don't be surprised to see some discussion of the process I'm using for my project here.

For now I just wanted to give everyone an idea of what I will be up to and provide a space for people to follow what I'm doing this summer.  I'll be arriving in country on June 17th and hopefully I'll have updates starting not too long after that, but internet can be somewhat unreliable so we'll see how things on the ground function before I make any promises about regular updates.

Thanks for reading!