NEW, NEW, and more NEW!

There is all sorts of NEW stuff going on around our house these days!

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We have a NEW neighbor!

My younger brother, Russell, started school here at Baylor this week and his dorm is four blocks away from our apartment. Lucky kid, right? We're happy to have him here and I'm glad to see him carry on the Baylor family legacy (he'll be the 17th Baylor graduate in our family). He's already following in his brother's footsteps of "happening" to call right around dinnertime "just" to see what I was doing. Cooking for three is just as easy as cooking for two and we enjoy the company just as much as he enjoys the free food so no complaints here.

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We have NEW kitchen appliances!

Our apartment complex changed management while we were in Ghana and I guess the new people took one look at the kitchen appliances and immediately tore them out. We had no idea this happened so we were very pleasantly surprised when we walked in and found a brand new refrigerator, dishwasher, and oven! We were already SO GLAD to be back to our apartment and all of the new stuff plus the fact that we had just picked up Maya after missing her for three weeks made for one happy household. Fingers crossed for a new washer/dryer!

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Kolby is teaching at a NEW school!

Tuesday was Kolby's first day to teach at his new school and he LOVES it! He teaches five classes of 9th grade English and has just one lesson plan to handle. Compare that to last year where he taught six classes and had to prepare six different lesson plans and you can see why he is such a happy camper. I'm so proud of him and so happy that he's had such a great start to his school year. And, the school dress code requires that he wear a tie so he also got to get a whole new wardrobe last week. Combine that with the kickin' briefcase he got for his birthday and he is just one dapper fellow these days.

We're Back!

Kolby and I made it back safe and sound from our three wonderful weeks volunteering in Ghana, West Africa. It was definitely the experience of a lifetime and we had such a great time soaking up the Ghanaian culture and sharing in the work of Village Exchange Ghana (VEG).

In addition to his work with the youth at VEG's resource center, Kolby taught basic numeracy and literacy to the two groups of young women involved in VEG's income-generation projects. Here is a picture of Kolby teaching in the village of Takla, where these women participate in VEG's Lady Volta Beads Project. As most of them are teen mothers, the project allows them to work flexible hours making jewelry in order to earn income for themselves while still being able to care for their children. You can view the Lady Volta Beads catalog here.

Here is a picture of the four seamstresses who participate in VEG's Lady Volta Batik project listening to Kolby's lesson on decimals (batik: textile-dyeing technique common in Ghana).

I worked with VEG's micro-credit program and spent most of my time with the rural women who participate in the program. These women use the small loans to aid their self-employment activities which usually consists of the trading of commodities such as vegetables, maize, fish, or household provisions. It was an eye-opening experience, and there are so many difficulties associated with the implementation of micro-credit that I would have never really understood without seeing it all first-hand.

Here is a picture taken at a meeting I held with the loan groups in the village of Helekpe.

Here's a picture of me in Helekpe with Mary, the chairperson of one of the loan groups, who gave me a bottle of honey that had been produced by a the women in her group.

Here is a group of women who produce palm kernel oil, a substitute for vegetable oil that is made from the seeds of an oil palm tree.

One weekend we made the treacherous 3-hour climb up Mount Adaklu. Here is a picture of us at the top.

Unfortunately, going down was even more difficult than going up. I didn't fare too well (huge hip bruise, rolled ankle, ants in my hair, etc.). Let's just say that if we were keeping score it would be Ghana-1, Emily-0.

Kolby, however, thoroughly enjoyed every part of the excursion. Here he is in front of the mountain with our "tour guide" (11-year old boy), Wonda.

Another weekend we went to a village called Tafi Atome where we visited a monkey sanctuary and rode bikes to a kente cloth weaving village.

It was a great trip, but after three weeks of cold showers, mosquito bites, unfamiliar food, and a $6.50/night hotel room, we were eager to make it home! We are grateful for the amazing experience and send our love back to VEG and our new friends there!

Going, Going, Ghana!

We are off to Ghana, Africa for a three-week volunteer placement at Village Exchange Ghana. We will work primarily with their micro-credit program and Kolby will also spend some time teaching English to local youth. Our micro-credit work will involve assessing and selecting loan candidates, organizing workshops, reviewing business plans, and setting up new loan groups. Offering these small loans to the disadvantaged women of Ghana is VEGs main tool for poverty alleviation and Kolby and I are excited to take part in such important work! I'm not sure if we'll have internet access while we're there, but I'll be sure to post about our trip after we get back on August 16th. Please pray for our safety... Africa is a long way away from home!

Open Water Certified

Kolby and I, along with my family, finished our SCUBA certification this past weekend. We had to do four dives at a lake and demonstrate that we could successfully do all of the underwater skills like achieving neutral buoyancy, removing and replacing our mask, navigating using a compass, using our buddy's alternate air supply, and doing an emergency ascent. Despite having to get into a full-length wetsuit in 100 degree heat and then carry 65 pounds of equipment on our backs down to the water, the actual diving was a lot of fun. We saw some nasty 2' long catfish and my dad had his ear bitten by a sunfish so hard that it bled. Good times. I would have taken a picture if I thought anyone would be able to stand seeing what we looked like in those wetsuits. It was a great thing to do as a family and now we're ready for our trip to the Great Barrier Reef!

A One-in-a-Million Shot

I went golfing yesterday for the first time in a year and I hit a bird. Hit as in killed... with a golf ball. We played with Kolby's parents and as we were practicing at the driving range right before our tee time I hit a really nice shot and somehow nailed a bird flying by. It dropped dead right out of the sky. I said "oh my gosh Kolby I just killed a bird" and before he could tell me that I was surely mistaken he saw it lying there about 30 feet out with its feet straight up in the air. I don't think I'll be going golfing again for awhile.

Poverty Alleviation through Micro-Credit

Most of you probably know that I'm in grad school right now at Baylor seeking a Master of Science in Economics degree. I started the program this past January and will graduate next May. There are only 11 students and I am the only one who chose to write a thesis (I guess the others knew better?). Anyways, I have a very love/hate relationship with my thesis because it is a really great experience and I do enjoy it, but it is also the most daunting task I've ever taken on. I recently responded to a call for papers and just received notice that my paper “Micro-Credit and Household Productivity: Evidence from Bangladesh” has been accepted for presentation at the 2008 Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture, Bottom-up Approaches to Global Poverty to be held October 23-25. So my thesis deadline just got bumped up about seven months meaning this summer will be BUSY.

Since my thesis work (and grad school in general) is dominating my life I thought I'd share what I'm working on. My main interest is poverty alleviation in developing countries and my specific area of research is micro-credit. The basic idea of micro-credit is that many of the rural poor don't lack the skills to lift themselves out of poverty, they just lack the start-up cash to get their own small business off the ground. For instance, if a woman in a rural village is talented at basket-weaving but she can't afford the supplies to make her first basket... she is stuck. Traditional banks don't lend to the poor (because of lack of collateral) and independent money-lenders are likely to scam poor borrowers into interest rates of 200-400%. So, the idea of micro-credit programs is to offer very small loans to the poor using a group-based lending model that substitutes peer pressure for collateral. The borrowers use this money to start or expand their business (usually selling commodities or farming) and are able to earn enough income to provide for their family and pay back the loan (micro-credit programs boast a payback rate of over 90%!).

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Here is an excerpt from my paper proposal:

"Micro-credit programs provide small amounts of credit to the poor to aid their self-employment activities or small enterprise involvement. This model for poverty reduction was pioneered by Nobel Peace Prize recipient Mohammuad Yunus and his infamous Grameen Bank and has since inspired the inception of over 3,300 micro-credit programs reaching over 133 million clients, 70% of whom lived on less than US$1 a day. Although these programs may vary in nature, they all strive to lift clients (and their families) out of poverty by providing them access to the credit they need to establish or expand a small, self-sustaining business. Previous research has shown that micro-credit is successful in improving the welfare of borrowing households by increasing and smoothing their consumption, improving the health status of their children, empowering their women, and improving their poverty status. This paper will test the hypothesis that micro-credit also improves the welfare of borrowing households by raising their productivity. An increase in the productivity of a household means that the other welfare improvements that result from the participation in a micro-credit program can be sustained by that household over the long term."

The Land Down Under

My parents are in the midst of finalizing our family trip to Australia to celebrate Russell's high school graduation. When Brad graduated we went to Europe and when I graduated we went on a safari in Botswana and to Italy. Below is a few pictures I took in Africa (without using zoom, crazy huh?) on our trip in the summer of 2004.

We are waiting until December to go to Australia so that it will be summer there, and our trip sounds INSANELY neat. Since Russell got to pick the destination and activities we are planning some crazy stuff. We are going to scuba dive on the Great Barrier Reef (all seven of us are getting scuba certified this summer!), climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge, go skydiving, learn how to surf and how to sandboard, and visit Kangaroo Island where Kolby will get to fulfill his childhood dream of hugging a koala bear.

This year our family has expanded from five to seven with Brad and I both getting married and we are ready to show the in-laws the glory of a Webb family vacation! We are remarkably blessed to be part of a family that values spending time together having fun and experiencing new things with each other!

New School!

Today Kolby signed a contract to teach 9th grade English at a great high school nearby. He spent an insane first year of teaching at a middle school and is very excited to make the move. At the middle school, Kolby taught 6 different classes every day and had to prepare separate lesson plans for each of his classes: 7th grade English, 6th grade Gifted and Talented (GT) English, 7th grade GT English, 8th grade GT English, 7th grade Reading, and Study Skills. As the GT teacher he also was in charge of Odyssey of the Mind (OM), an extra-curricular creative competition that many of his GT kids were involved in. So, he has spent this past year working very hard writing each lesson plan from scratch, commuting 60 miles round-trip from Waco to ****, and staying after school most days to coach the OM teams. In spite of this very full plate, he has received RAVE reviews from the staff, parents, and kids at the school. He had 4 out of 5 of his OM teams make it to the State Competition and even had a team make it to the World Finals (he leaves this weekend to accompany them to Washington D.C.). Although he enjoyed his time there and is having to disappoint the MANY that have begged him to stay, the new position was too good to refuse.

Congrats, husband, on the new job!

A Year Ago Today

It was a year ago today that Kolby proposed to me. Actually, this exact time last year I was minutes away from getting engaged and had no idea it was coming. I love thinking about that day and I hope I'll always be able to remember it as well as I can right now.

The past year has been the best of my life with the obvious highlight being our beautiful wedding day and our fun first months of marriage, but also the time I got to spend wedding planning with my mom. We had the best time together doing all the shopping, trying on dress after dress, making fun decisions, bringing organization to a whole new level (even for us!), and getting everything together for what turned out to be the most perfect wedding I could ever have imagined. I will always treasure that time and am so grateful for the love and support of my parents, especially this year. Thanks mom & dad!

All Grown Up

My younger brother, Russell, is graduating from high school next week. He's been the "baby" of both sides of my family and something just doesn't seem right about him being old enough to leave home. Russell was definitely blessed with the looks in the family and has been cute his whole life (a feat for which Brad nor I can claim for ourselves). His natural charm and handsome smile even came close to making up for the fact that he had to introduce himself as "wussell webb" until 3rd grade.

Now he is a crazy high school senior getting ready to finally experience the college life for himself. He tried to fight off the family draw to Baylor but eventually came to his senses and realized that he bleeds green and gold just like the rest of us!

New Initiative for 25 Cloth

My brother's t-shirt company, 25 Cloth, just launched their new initiative for this quarter. The are partnering with an organization that helps children in developing countries who are born with club foot, a disability that is simple to fix but results in major disability if left untreated. This quarter, each t-shirt you buy provides the casting materials for one of these children.

To learn more, visit the website www.25cloth.com to see their new t-shirt designs and to make a purchase that will change the life of a child born with club foot.

Ho - Volta Region - Ghana - Africa

Kolby and I have officially booked our trip to Ghana! We are taking a three-week volunteer placement at Village Exchange Ghana, a small NGO that strives to "empower Ghana's disadvantaged women through poverty alleviation strategies and reproductive and sexual health programs". VEG's main instrument for poverty alleviation is micro-credit, which is my main interest and focus within my graduate study (M.S. Economics at Baylor) and is also the topic of my thesis. So I'll be working with the micro-credit efforts and Kolby will be working with youth-- teaching English, improving literacy, and aiding the reproductive and sexual health programs.

We will be leaving on July 27th and returning on August 16th. The VEG website is villageexchangeinternational.org if you want to check it out and learn more about the work they do in Ghana.

Happy Birthday Maya!

Today we celebrated Maya's second birthday! It was a year ago today that we got her from the animal shelter and the staff there guessed her to be about a year old, so we figured this would be as good of a date as any to be her birthday. She went to the vet last week for her first healthy check-up and got an A+! What a long way she has come in the past year! We thought this milestone was worthy of a celebration so we had a birthday party for her at her favorite baseball field and all three of her best friends came to share in the fun. Beasley didn't want to cooperate, but here's a picture of the rest of the gang at the party.

Around the House

We spent some time yesterday doing some much needed work around our apartment, including the installation of a window air conditioning unit in our bedroom. The silly thing was nearly impossible to put in and Kolby was trying to do it while watching the NBA playoffs so it took a couple hours and we still couldn't get it totally right.

What's done is done, and I'd say we're 40% certain it will fall out the window at some point in the near future. It'd be a three story drop, so we avoid parking our car in the space below.

The new air conditioner will be nice because it will keep us from having to run our main air conditioner all night just to keep one room cool. We have a few extra rooms and bathrooms and we keep the A/C vents closed in them and at night we close those doors so we're not loosing cool air. At least once a week we get ready to go to bed, notice Maya isn't in our room on her bed yet, and then have to go on a scavenger hunt though the whole place opening the doors to every room, bathroom, or closet to find which one we accidently shut her in. That's the one time that her silence is quite inconvenient. So the window unit, although pretty old school, is a welcomed break for us all.

Speaking of old, check out our washing machine. It took us awhile to figure out when we first moved in, but you just press the "Eject" button, ...

... pull really hard on the handle, and BAM! the whole thing just falls into your lap.

Clean clothes and a workout, who could ask for more?

Trapped!

The other day we were cleaning up around the apartment and needed to vacuum, which Maya doesn't care to be around for, so Kolby had the bright idea of putting her in the downstairs bathroom until we were finished. While she was in there, one of the drawers somehow rolled out and blocked the door from opening.

Here is a picture (taken after the event) of what had happened.

The situation was really funny at first and we had a good time trying some creative attempts to get the drawer closed with only a tiny crack to work with. We could open the door enough to get a clothes hanger through but couldn't open it wide enough to even get a finger through the crack. We tried EVERYTHING we could think of to get that drawer closed and even tried putting some peanut butter on a wire hanger and dangling it over the drawer to see if we could get Maya to bump the drawer shut herself. Maya is much too calm of a dog to offer any help with the drawer, and since she's basically mute we had no idea how she was doing in there. The hinges to the door and the screws to the doorknob were all on the inside of the door so we had nothing to work with. We started to get a little nervous because she'd been in there for over half an hour, it was getting late, and we were making zero progess.

We had our friend Laura come over to see if her small hands could be of any use but all she did was lose several bits of sticky tack through the crack, which I'm sure Maya ate thinking they were peace offerings. By this time it had been an hour and Kolby was in the process of gettting the cordless drill set up thinking we'd just have to sacrifice the door. Then, while brainstorming ideas on the phone with my mom I remembered that the air conditioning unit is located above the ceiling of that bathroom and that there's an air vent in the stairwell that might allow us to get into the bathroom through the ceiling.

The air conditioning unit was quite a road block and made it impossible to shift the ceiling tile more than a couple inches. But, it did allow us to get a broom through the ceiling and Kolby was able to knock the drawer shut with the broom handle. Kolby's arm suffered some trauma in the process (he had to shove this entire arm through a crack that was less than 3" wide and then use the muscles that were being squished to maneuver the broom), but Maya was finally free!

Here's Maya afterwards, unsure of what had just happened.

Who says nothing exciting ever happens around here?