October 30: Contact, finally

After accepting mutually busy schedules, the director of the U.S. Tostan office and I finally settled for a phone conversation. Even this proved difficult, as it took several phone calls to even set up an opportune time to converse. Gannon Gillespie, the director whom I’ve been emailing with, was as enthusiastic as you would expect the director of an organization like Tostan to be. As I still only know a preliminary amount about Tostan I would have liked to inquire a bit about that. Gannon, however, was eager to discuss much bigger plans. We spoke about what we could possibly do to, at the very least, promote FGM awareness. He told me that there was a substantial amount of interest from both AU students and faculty in forming a group at AU. We discussed my time availability--which is promising-- and how we would go about forming such a group. While I think that solely heading the formation of a Tostan group at AU would be biting off a bit more than I could chew, I think a much more realistic and ultimately beneficial goal would be planning an event to see how much interest we could generate.
We discussed events that Tostan has done in the past. He discussed a fundraiser in which a company donated money for every meal swipe students donated. This reminded me of a popular event at AU in which students use their meal swipes on boxed lunch and give it to the homeless. Hopefully students would be equally generous with their meal swipes for the cause of FGM. He explained how helpful it would be to have a group at AU. Specifically, he mentioned the difficulty in obtaining the support of companies in that there are so many non-profits competing for the same support. He noted that the ability to offer up something like a group at a local college could actually have a substantial impact on a companies’ decision to donate. We ultimately decided to plan something that would either generate interest or test how much interest the AU community has in FGM.
Aside from informally forming a plan of sorts, my conversation with Gannon was very interesting. Firstly, we discussed where he had been (as I knew he had been out of town until October 27). Apparently he had been all throughout Europe doing Tostan-related stuff. I thought that was very interesting as it showed the international pertinence of Tostan. Also surprising was the fact that an AU student currently interns at Tostan. Luckily, she was in the office during mine and Gannon’s conversation. We spoke on the phone and set up a time to meet. Gannon suggested the possibility of the 2 of us working to plan an event together. Hopefully it’ll work out. Either way, I’m excited to meet with her and learn a little bit more about Tostan.