Wednesday, August 8, 2012

CEO's don't take vacations...

...They just temporarily get much better offices!
Attending a phone seminar entitled "Library Development and Book Distribution in West Africa"
One Bead at the Beach! I'm in the pink with 2 of my sisters, Margot and Paige pictured to my right
This past week I went on vacation with my family to Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. Aside from eating some delicious seafood and enjoying the beach, I attended two phone seminars sponsored by CGIU. 
A few days before vacation, my mom and I realized that we can't just "go on vacation" on our One Bead website. In other words, we needed to pack all of the supplies required to ship orders of beads from the beach. and it's a good thing we did. One Bead had over 10 orders of bracelets! So during our lunch and dinner breaks from the sand and sea we would take a peek at pay pal and if an order appeared started packing. The next challenges were my phone conferences. The sand ended up making a GREAT chalkboard. I had signed up for phone seminars a while back that were put on by CGIU, which I attended last spring in Washington, DC.  The first one was "Designing and Managing Socially and Economically Sustainable Projects" and the second was "Library Development and Book Distribution in West Africa". The second was particularly interesting to me as my next goal involves building some sort of library at the Oloosirkon Government Primary School. One thing that was emphasized multiple times in each session was the importance of including the community in the process of building. Sustainable projects only work if they are backed by the community in which they evolve. The members of the community surrounding the school can best assess what they need and don't need.
Overall it was a great trip. Now that it is over it's time to focus on the next big thing...Africa!

xxx

Sara

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