La Vaina

So I'm still in the office waiting for an article to pop into our magazine, La Vaina, and be done with it. :) It's a comfy office though with internet, couches, and everything I could need. I think we have to spend another night in the city since the country director needs to sign off on the final product. I was going to meet with some other volunteers in Penenome about environmental education tonight and was planning on teaching four classes tomorrow in the school tomorrow. So those plans are off. But heck, a free hotel room with cabel tv and a hot shower are hard to pass up! :) Plus, I'm happy with the changes I've been able to impliment thus far. Lee, who was the editor before, has been a little resistant to our ideas. He really is into the status quo, even though there are things he doesn't like about La Vaina. (He hates the pink boxes on the top of the pages which were left over from the previous editors over a year ago. He hadn't taken the time to change them and didn't feel the need to do it this time either.) I really wanted the pictures that are put in each article to make a little more sense and match the content of the article. And I won! But we hardly got any picture submissions, so a lot of the pics are from the three of us which I feel is kinda weird. (Lee picked one of mine for the front cover. Jay picked another for the inside cover. And I put one on the next page. In all I have at least ten photos in there. But, you gotta admit, I am good! jk)

The next round in September, Jay and I are going to be changing EVERYTHING. We'll use Adobe InDesign instead of a ghetto old version of Adobe Pagemaker. That will make the layout a lot faster and much cleaner. (Lee likes eyeballing things.) We'll be picking a theme to carry through the mag to make it more cohesive. And we also want a group of writers and photographers that we can call on for some quality work, like I had on Semester at Sea. Basically we want to shift the whole focus to the volunteers more instead of having the staff scramble to write something at the last minute and fill up half the La Vaina with things they've already emailed us. It's going to be good though!!! And I hope it will be something to be proud of.

If nothing else, it has been and will continue to be a great experience to draw on once I get back to the States and am looking for a job. I'm working closely with the senior staff to get their articles and plan for future editions. I'm doing lots of editing which is good experience for any job. (Plus all the best people to write me letters of recommendation or netword to find me jobs are seeing all my work first hand.) Putting together the newsletter is something I could see myself doing in an environmental education center or national park depending on what I end up doing down the road.