About My Work

So I realized that I haven’t actually put much of anything on my blog about my job here in Antigua, so I’m going to fix that now. =)

I’m working at the Gilbert Agricultural and Rural Development Center (GARD Center) helping them with various branding, communications, and IT projects. Over the past few weeks, I created a new website for them at http://gardc.org/, designed a series of pamphlets entitled the “Cost of Production Series”, created posters and flyers to advertise for their upcoming courses, created a course catalog, helped to design/layout the annual report, created a slide presentation (80+ slides long) which tells the history of the GARD Center over the past twenty years and a few other things as well.

I guess the strangest thing about my job at GARD Center is that it’s basically a desk job. I left Seattle thinking I was leaving my desk job behind me and got to Antigua only to pick up another desk job. At first this kind of bothered me, but then I realized that I came to Antigua to share some of my skills with GARD Center and if these are the skills they need then it’s a good thing I have them to share. The question is; if I weren’t working on these projects, what would I be working on? The answer: I sincerely have no idea.

What’s even better about the projects that I’ve been working on these past few weeks is that they’ve made me realize that I really like doing this kind of layout and design work. I get really focused when I work on these materials and can spend hours dinking around with them to make them just as I want them to be. The problem is that I know that I’m probably breaking 1001 design rules so I’m strongly considering taking some design courses when I get back to the States.

Overall, I love the work that I’m doing with GARD Center. The group of women that I work with are amazingly talented, fun to be around, and very committed to their work and the Center’s students. I’m learning so much more at GARD Center than I feel like I’m giving but I suppose that’s all part of the experience of being a Peace Corps volunteer... your relationship with your organization is give and take and you always walk away feeling like you didn’t give as much as you received.

So if you want to view some of the things that I’ve been working on visit http://gardc.org/ and look at the “Resources” page under “GARD Center Publications”. You can also look under “Students” and “Upcoming Courses” to view the course catalog that I created. Below is one of the posters that I created for our upcoming courses.