Email journal: July 16, 2006, Zambia The project and research continue to “evolve.” Last week the development team had been planning to attend a community assessment workshop, focusing on Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) methods. This workshop was meant to be the first of two, the second being a week long training on how to combine PRA with Frierean literacy principles. Both of these workshops would be “Trainings of Trainers,” in which the development team would not only learn these methods and principles, but how to train others in them as well. However, unfortunately the facilitator who was to lead the first workshop had a family emergency on the weekend before the training, and the workshop had to be postponed until after my departure. So the team and I have changed gears once again, and begun to focus on monitoring and evaluation. In many of our discussions, regarding both the future literacy program and the programs that the team is currently running, the issue of how to assess a program’s progress and make adjustments came up repeatedly. So last week the team and I hashed out: what the organization is already doing to monitor and evaluate its programs, where their weakness lay, and what they can do to improve. We went over some basic monitoring and evaluation principles, and applied these principles by designing a monitoring system for one of their projects here in Lusaka. This coming week we’ll be going out to the project site so that the project stakeholders can give their input to the monitoring system, and so it can be tested. I’m looking forward to seeing how it all works out. Luke