Final Push

I just finished my final week and a half of work at Juventas and it has been very busy. For much of the beginning of last week, I entered data from the July outreach work into the excel database I created earlier. The data was much easier to enter with the new format I created and, as I worked on this with one of the outreach staff, he will now be able to quickly and easily enter data each month to update the database. The last three days of last week were dedicated to compiling final reports for each project for the Global Fund. This not only included writing conclusions and summaries of all the projects and data collected, but also sorting and presenting all the receipts and summaries of where and how money was spent. I mostly edited reports written in English and helped a lot with sorting receipts and making sure everything added up accurately. I also completed the outreach form which is now being used for the outreach work. I have saved all these documents and will be sending them once I get back to the US with faster internet speed.

I also went with one of the outreach staff to help him take care of some things related to the outreach work. First, I helped him type up schedules for the following few months about when each group is supposed to go out as he is not very comfortable with computers. I then also helped him sort through all the client?s names and codes to try and match them up. Technically, each client is supposed to be written in through a code, however, once a client is seen more regularly, the staff tends to just start writing in their first name or nickname on the form. However, at times, different outreach groups know clients through a different nickname or one group may know a client better than another and then that group writes just the first name while the other writes the code and then it is difficult to see that it is the same person. Therefore, we tried to look through all the outreach reports for the last year to make a list of all the names that match up with a specific code so that it could be available to all the outreach staff. I feel that writing nick names could breach confidentiality and that even the code used is a little too personally related to the clients, but I am not sure what a better system would be to remember each client but in a way that is completely unrelated to that client.

I also went out for the outreach work itself almost every night for the last week. On Friday, we went to a city, Niksic, which is 40 minutes away from Podgorica. This city is known for having a lot of fights and for having some of the most reckless drivers. In general, traffic here is extremely hectic and people drive very dangerously. Almost every two miles or so on one of the highways to the beach there are flowers hanging on trees which mark spots where someone died in a traffic accident. Just along the street outside the apartment complex in which I live, I can see three flower arrangements set up by the side of the road. In Niksic, the problem is even worse and I was a little scared that we would be driving there and through the town. Everything turned out well although there definitely were some moments where I froze up a little such as when a car passed us while another car was coming the other way and then our three cars drove side-by-side on a narrow road on which I didn?t even think two cars could pass by comfortably. In Niksic, we handed out supplies to several clients that our outreach staff knows and who have been responsible in distributing those supplies to anyone who needs it in the town.

Our outreach work in Podgorica has been a little slow and stressful. Many drug dealers and transport paths have recently been uncovered by the police and lots of arrests have been made. Thus, there is currently a big lack of drugs in the area and everyone is a lot more scared and cautious to avoid arrest. Many people we have thus recently seen have been in a crisis and it has not been uncommon for them to offer us money if we can find them some drugs. This really

bothers me as it completely counters everything the program is set up to do and makes me feel that the clients don't accurately understand what our goals are and what our purpose is with the outreach work. Additionally, a lot of them have been taking low quality drugs and anything else, such as pills, that they can get their hands on, and thus they have not been feeling very well and have been much harder to talk with. Also, when they take pills and such for a while and then get some cleaner type of heroine, it is much easier for them to overdose and to have serious side effects from the drugs. One of the outreach staff who is a doctor and works in an emergency room has seen three overdoses in the last week which is very high for such a small city. I am not really sure what will happen now if the access to drugs keeps decreasing, although, most likely,

dealers will find new routes and they will recover the supply soon.

Other than that, today I am getting ready to head to Serbia to see my mom's side of the family for the next 10 days before returning to the US. Overall, working with Juventas has been a great experience and I have learned more than I could ever imagine about non-profit work, harm reduction programs, and drugs in general. This experience has really showed me different sides of the city in which I was born that I would never have been able to learn about from taking

short summer vacations here. I was really able to see what it is like to live here and what it means for a country to be in a transition. Finally, I formed many new friendships and am looking forward to staying in touch with everyone I have met and to hopefully see them again next year!