Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for making the time and being here. As you know, last month we had a capped day of the week at Hillbrick. And I gave this dog a very similar one in that really. But unfortunately we had some technical difficulties. So the audio wasn't coming through the WebEx here. So I figured the first chance I'll get to come to Addis, I'll give the talk again in person here. And hopefully you can hear me okay, so we don't have any WebEx difficulties here. I'll speak for a little about 30 minutes or so. I'm trying to give you a broad overview of capacity and development across the institute. It won't cover everything, because for that only far more than 30 minutes. So feel free to stop me at any point during the presentation. But certainly I'll be very happy to engage in anything that might not be covered here or that you'd like to dig in a little bit deeper after the presentation as well. So I want to read everything that's on the slide in front of you. But as you can see we have quite a lot to share and quite a lot to cover. Because there really is quite a lot going on. So this is the 30 minute speed dating version of Caldev Addis. To start off with, I'd like to just recap a little bit where Caldev comes from in terms of where it sits in the Illry strategy and fits it with Illry's vision and mission. So as you all know, Illry has three strategic objectives. One of them is to draw capacity and five critical success factors. One of which is again to draw the capacity. And therefore that really gives us the accurate guidance of where we need to focus our efforts. And the quest to help us all achieve the overall Illry vision and mission. Now within the broader CGIR context, there's been a lot going on in the last few years on capacity development. This is actually quite an exciting time to be in capacity development or to be aware of capacity development, whatever your function is. One of the reasons is that there's a very strong renewed interest in focus on capacity development. We see that for instance with the SRF, the Strategy Results Framework, the so-called Bible of the CGIR. And the June 2015 version has a very strong focus on capacity development compared to the previous version. There is a dedicated section on it. There are very clear indications of how it should be incorporated. And also perhaps mostly there are the so-called IDOs, the Intermediary Development Outcomes. There is an IDO one can ask to development or to state sub-IDOs. And that will help guide the work of CRTs throughout the second phase of 2017, 2023, 2022. So there will be a lot going on there. There is a lot of work that was done by the capacity development community of practice, which is a CGIR pipeline, to help CRTs and centers be more ready for this. One of the things that was prepared is a capacity development framework for the second round of CRTs, which has been adopted after a long round of consultations and sets out the framework with nine distinct elements plus capacity to innovate. More recently in November of last year, a document was released around capacity development indicators that is still a first draft. There will be more consultations and work in progress. But that is really a key issue as well, because whatever we don't count doesn't count. And if we don't have good indicators, then it'll just stay, you know, as an abstract notion that we pay lip service to. So we really want to make it something actionable and therefore we'll see a lot more on that going forward. Perhaps the most attention-grabbing, though, was the decision to put some more resources behind an enhanced community of practice. And right now, as it goes, there will be a minimal support of around a million dollars a year. And then perhaps more in the future to grow that into a fully fledged platform on capacity development. So there's a lot going on there. And Ilry has been playing a very active role. We were involved from the start in reviving the community of practice and we played an active role in it. And so there's a lot of opportunities there and also a lot of recognition for our work there. So this seems a bit of a retrofitting, saying that the candidate was a month ago, almost to the day. But still, the wire behind it is still important now and into the future. So why do we have a captive week? What's so new and exciting? Well, first of all, what you should walk away with is that everyone should walk away through this room exactly like that logo. You know, feeling really excited about capacity development. Because there really is a lot going on. If you've been paying attention, a lot of it isn't that new. It's things that have been going on throughout in terms of our approaches, how we embed it, how we use best practice in a range of fields to take it forward. But we get screwed up a number of things for captive week. So for example, the captive section of the website, which I'm sure you will visit every morning before you do anything else, got a makeover. You also had a first wave of online courses. And I'll speak more about that later, going live on captive week. We had a series of captive briefs launched, so eight went live. There are copies here in the room that you can pick up to supplement the ones that you already have in your room and in your office. And we have a long pipeline of many more. So I mean, this captive week could easily have been a captive month, because there really is a lot going on.  So eight presentations throughout the week, all of which were recorded with the exception of mine, which had technical difficulties in being re-recorded now. So all of them will be also available online for you to revisit and to deep deeper into. One of the reasons, one of the other reasons we had captive week is because for some people, there was still the misconception that capacity development is only about the administration of fellowship contracts.  With that done, with that said, the first thing I'll talk to you about is a little bit of fellowship numbers. But I'll do that relatively quick. It's still an important part of Hillary's mandate in capacity development. And so even though I'll talk maybe slightly more passionately about some of the newer and innovative stuff that we're doing, this remains a very important part and will continue to be so. So the numbers that you have here are actually newly recruited in 2015. It gives you an overview. So about 206 graduate fellows, research fellows and interns. And it gives you the breakdown by programs that you can see which programs are sort of driving it. You can see that ASSP tops the list. And that's single-handedly thanks to the LIFE's program that represents that on its own would also be up there. But there are many other programs with good work in this area. We also have good balance. So 28 nationalities, around 40% female. So we're doing good work in this area and we hope to continue on this trend. We have a new fellowship information system going live soon. We've been piloting it for the last few months in Nairobi and we'll take it live in the next quarter or two once it's fully integrated into all of Hillary's ICT systems and so on. It's a fully compatible with OCS system. So we recognize early on that this might not be the first priority of OCS when going live, but we needed a system that would allow us to be more efficient, to have better reporting, to avoid, you know, multiple spreadsheets and so on, and try to eliminate the sort of long email and paper trails that were associated with administration. We're very happy about that. It took about two years to put together and we're very excited to have that go live throughout both the United States and Nairobi and throughout the region. So look out for more information on that in the coming months. We also have a lot of short-term trainings taking place. That will also continue to be an important part of individual training. So as you see again, ASAP is doing fantastic with over 6,000 trained in 2015. And Hillary has a whole hand over 140 trainings throughout reaching over 8,500 people. There's a lot going on there. We will want to get this information refined a bit more, so trying to get into the categories of people trained, trying to track that a little bit better, also trying to align that with dashboards so that we can get that information a little bit more clearly. And also, we'd really like to follow up on impact on that. So whether we've trained 5 people, 50 or 5,000, what has been the impact with those? And that's going to require us to go back and refine that a little bit better. But we have very good pace. And this again cuts across the institute. Maybe not evenly, but everyone recognizes that this is something that firms far more. Now it's very important to stress that capacity development at Hillary is far bigger than the captive unit. And that's the way it should be. So if we track, for instance, FTEs, full-time equivalents across the institutes, so we see that, for instance, the captive unit isn't the first or the second unit in terms of staffing. And that's the way we want it embedded in the programs and the units. And even those seven positions that you see, or the captive unit, 75% of those are paid directly by programs, so by doing programmatic work. So we're very happy to see that. There's around 40 full-time equivalent positions in Hillary, and more than 100 individuals are involved in delivering those. And they're spread throughout the institute, most of the intermediate sciences, but also in the biosciences, and also in institutional planning and partnerships. What that means is that not only there's lots that's going on, but also there's a lot of opportunities for better synergies and for making the home bigger than the sum of its parts. Because really, it's across the institute. It's not the captive unit that does up their administration. The next thing I want to touch on quickly is some of the work that we've been doing. In the previous, you could say pioneering in the case of the real DCG, instructional design and applying all types of learning, including online and blended learning. So instructional design, as I'm sure everyone who attended the first presentation can tell us, is basically a form of bioeducational psychology that we use in order to make learning more effective and accessible to the public. Instructional designers would probably not be able to do very much on their own. So that's why it's always a combination of having an instructional designer working together with subject matter experts to take the materials to the next level and really make them effective. And we're getting a lot of traction on that. It was very hard to get people to buy into this concept initially, but now it's growing more and more, and we're very happy about that. So Debra here is a full-time instructional design specialist based here at Addis, and she is the only full-time instructional designer in the whole of the CJIR system. So again, this is something where Debra is taking the lead on. We have a range of roster of consultants and advisors that we also work with so that we can respond to growing needs. And this is indeed a growing area where we have more work coming up. And we're very excited about that. So a couple of examples. So one example is the Feast Materials. How many in the room know the Feast Materials? Okay. So the Feast stands for the Feed Assessment Tool. It's basically, in a nutshell, a participatory and rapid method of assessing feed strategies. And it's been used for many years and in many countries before we got involved. And what we were asked to do, together with Feast experts, so Michael is sitting in the room and Duncan and then Kuyu and others, is basically work on the delivery. But in so doing, we had a lot of relations of the process, the tools themselves also got tweaked in the process and refined further. But the big thing was, you know, a new interactive course. So the course itself, which was actually launched here in Addis in May of 2015, in conjunction with the eLearning Africa conference that took place in Angus last year, where it was also presented, ended up looking like a modular, 12 modular set of lessons, over 60 videos, over three hours of videos, five interactive, scenario-based exercises, and lots of over 200 exercise and review questions to help reinforce learning and to help people gauge how they're doing. It's a blended experience. And by blended, we mean that we take an online component and a face-to-face traditional component and we use them together. And that's worked out quite well. The picture you see, Ben and Kuyu using some of the online materials in a face-to-face training in Uganda in November of 2014. So there's a lot going on there, and that is related to a new learning management system that we have. Kuyu is familiar with the term learning management system, or LMS. So a learning management system is basically a platform where we can play these learning materials. Now, you could say that we could just, you know, load all the videos to YouTube and send a YouTube link and just have all the recipes up there and let people just play around with it. And that's one option of doing it, but generally speaking, not a very good one. So what we want to have is an ability to track performance to see how people are doing, to integrate a lot of different components. And that's that using specialized software and using specialized formats of the industry. Typically, these would be a SCORM format, a TeamCan, and so on. What we want to be doing is creating something that we can use and host that really gives a very nice user-friendly experience to the users while giving a lot of functionality in the back-end in terms of our tracking and reporting and management abilities. We thought that we'd find this off the shelf. It turned out that it's not that simple to find what we want for a number of reasons. One, it's an extremely fragmented market. There are literally thousands and thousands of web vendors. There isn't sort of one vendor that captures the market and so on. The second thing is that the countries and the audiences that we're trying to reach are fundamentally different than what the industry is gearing itself to. So by and large, the industry has been Googleized. So they all expect us to be running on U.S.-based servers and have 24-7 access to broadband and all run on, you know, ladies' equipment and so on. So when we think of the context of Ethiopia or many of the countries that really works there, that's simply a type. We need an assistant that would work also in low bandwidth environments. We need a system that would not rely on all kinds of existing infrastructure environments. At the end, we partnered with Sonata Learning, who were very accommodating in incorporating all of our wishlist into their development plan. And today we have something that's very exciting, that's a clean interface, that understands that we want to blend things, that works in low bandwidth environments, that has good reporting features. And in the URL there, a few courses are a lot. We'd love for you to go around and play with it and experience it further. But perhaps as for more exciting is the so-called offline player. Because even if we have connectivity, and sometimes great connectivity here on the Alice campus, when we go out to the field, we won't have that anymore. And that's as valid in Ethiopia as it's valid in perhaps 80% of the countries that already work there. So we need something that would look great, you know, the head office, but then when you actually went to implement it, it became useless. So we wanted to create the same rich online learning experience offline. Ironically, the industry was closer to offering that 20 years ago than it is today. Today people just assumed, you know, everyone is always online. So all of the systems that we have back, you know, CD-ROM based trainings and all of that have all been left behind. So today the only ones we scattered for existing solutions, the only ones that had anything, you know, remotely functional or, you know, militaries.  So we ended up having Sonata develop an offline player that essentially enables us to deliver the full content offline as well. It also has some practical features built into it. So if you take the USB stick and you copy it to another computer, another computer, as people will do, that's perfectly fine. It gives them a unique identified. So we can still track individual performance. So long as at one point someone can take that information, go to a place with internet connectivity and send it back, we can also integrate it to our main online platform for ordering and tracking. So that's something that we're very happy with. Incidentally, we've negotiated with our partner, Sonata Learning, that this is accessible with no extra cost to any CGIR center so that we keep adding on EOV's license. So if there are other colleagues from other centers who think they'd like to use that, you're absolutely welcome to do that with an additional notice. This somewhat digital environment leads me to the next segment which is ICT for AdWords. How technology can play a role in the agricultural solutions that we hope to achieve. And firmly believe that ICT is part of the solution, ICT for AdWords. And there's a lot going on in our area. I have a few projects listed on the screen but they're really just scratching the surface and that's just from the stuff that I happen to know about. Because there's probably a dozen other projects that I don't have anything about. It's highly fragmented still and that's probably something that we as Illry who want to consolidate better because it's a huge part of the future with the way technology is advancing. In the United States they have this day that they call Black Life Friday. Black Friday is essentially a retail holiday. Everyone goes shopping, there are great discounts and it's a whole shopping phenomenon. In Black Friday last November, so a couple of months ago, you could have bought a pretty decent smartphone, a Motorola E. So a 4.5 inch screen, you know, 8GB of RAM, a good processor running the latest Android operating system for $10. I'm not missing a zero. $10. When we start getting state-of-the-art hardware for $5, for $10, for $15 and we combine that with free or cheap basic internet connectivity, a lot of the things that still today look like a pie tree in terms of what we can do in terms of accessibility, tracking, data, all the rest of it will be huge game changers. So it may seem like a pie tree, but we're really close, maybe five years away, certainly ten years away. But then again people were saying that five or ten years ago, so don't know me for that. But I really think there's a huge potential. Some of the projects that are already starting to experiment with it are showing pretty cool stuff. So for instance, the Iblee project is using gamifying and learning, mobile learning to increase organizational efficiency with the insurance partners they're working with. Pretty fun stuff, pretty pedagage stuff, but also a lot of useful insights coming up. In the animal health side, we have rapid diagnostics on a chip, which can be powered by mobile phone and use that same mobile phone to send back the results and get information. Again, cutting the process by time efficiency costs real big game changers. We have projects looking at nutrition in various angles and nutrition and ethics. There are systems that are looking at how to better track information to help transform genetics and so on and so forth. So there's a lot going on here. This is really something that we're excited to be a part. To give one specific example, the heavy nutrition project. So it's a project where Iblee is part of a consortium led by Cadi in partnership with Gay, Oxfam, and the British Medical Journal. This is a consortium looking to improve the lives of over a million mothers in 10 countries in South Suburban Africa and actually four more in South Asia, so 14 countries in total. So using the mobile channel as its primary covering. What are we doing? We're also running the training components, quality assurance, business support to mobile providers and so on. And we're very happy about that. I'm excited about some of the things in the learnings that are coming because a lot of it is really generic. So for instance, if we developed as we did courses on how to create content for the mobile channel, that's something that can be used by any project that has a small head before the rest of the acronym in front of it. So we're really hoping that these sort of projects will pave the way to a lot of exciting stuff in the coming years. One thing that we do probably the best kept secret is that there is actually research on capacity development. It's not only a service function. Not as much as I'd like to see, but a lot of potential there. So one example is the one that I mentioned before, the ImLearning Gamification. That's experimental designs or randomized control trial and so on looking at the effects of traditional training versus ImLearning versus caching centers and so on. Really interesting insights came out of Wave 1. They're now informing the design of Wave 2. And this is cutting edge stuff. There aren't too many places where you can go and read about RCTs being done on the mobile channel with gamification, let alone in places like pastoralized areas in Ethiopian and Kenyan. So a lot of interesting stuff there and there's a lot of potential to do so much more. Another area which is a sort of blended area has the service components, it has the research components is the whole work on innovation systems, innovation platforms. A lot of that here in the Ethiopian campus over the years continues to do so. So some examples from this past year. So there's been recent publication on mature innovation platforms, a landscape through three continents for a crowd-funded case study competition which was published just around Christmas. But also that lends itself to an online blended course which Deborah is leading. And I'll talk about it in a second. So there's really both ways that we can look at these things and we'd really like to encourage those of you who are to really look at some of the research aspects as well. It's very interesting. And this is not going away. So the sub-IDOs that I mentioned just before, so the sub-IDO on capacity development has four sub-IDOs two of which are on capacity to innovate which is the core of this stuff. So it's here to stay at least for a while. This online blended course that where I'm going to read everything on that dense slide but it really is exciting and it has a lot of attention to become the reference material for training on innovation systems within the CG system and hopefully before. Half of it is live already so you can visit the e-learner platform learning.learner.org and experience it and the other half will come live this year. Finally, opportunities. So there are a lot of opportunities. My first question will be how many people in this room are everything that I've shared today? And that's what I get wherever I share this with people. So getting that information out is very useful because there's a lot of synergies to be had here. And that's really what we want to encourage. The power of this is once it's embedded in the program it's once all scientists can take and leverage this work and really take it forward it will never be done by a small capacity development unit on its own nor do we want it to be. We really want to embed these principles and best practices and learn from a lot of root corners at the institute and help get it to others. And finally, now a very complete opportunity we are in the design stage of the city where we can capture things properly so that we don't have to retrofit the layer. 30 minutes to the dock. I think I'll stop here. Thank you very much for being patient and for your attention so far.


Hey everyone, welcome back for more xo zero's content. Today's video we're going to discuss is quarter verse chance for fc morris but before that if you want updated xo zero's content please hit the subscribe button. It's down below. Hey guys so what do we have here so we have a quarter verse chance increase again for extremely stubborn morris so the maintenance will begin i think tomorrow so it will be up until february 1st so a monday as well so a week for you to pull and morris if you want to so he has now a higher probability to be pulled for so in terms of his design it's similar no changes in design but i bet his skills have been have been actually been you know upgraded well so for skill changes you have two your passive skill changes um called tempering and steel weapon has been added so he actually has his original um what do you call this passive which is counters upon taking damage he also has heart strike because he's a banga family member so heart strike level one two and three so you need to deal damage to to that same that same hero which has heart strike to trigger the different levels as well and here is his two new skills which which will be included in the update or in the upgrade so tempering when the battle starts increases attack of all allies by 10 percent again that's 10 percent that's it's not that much but if you add to it his steel weapon trigger steel weapon once around when the attack hits so it's a buff increases attack of all allies by 20 four four turns so this is going to be significant with these these two actually giving extra extra buffs to the attack of all allies one one thing that you should take note is that morris hails from the nombay and again who's from the nombay it's rachel and with fc april there and with morris you can actually create a team which really you know increases your attack exponentially with with fc april you get um the increase in in the damage taken by your opponents with him is the increase of attack so just put two and two together you you'll definitely deal a lot of damage now now that even morris is here i'm just saying this as a hypothetical team probably a team but you would like to try out um because um you know he's ready with and he could actually be you know he could only be better he could go better or or could just be could improve your team um more once he's there if you won't use him for for your main pvp team you can actually use him in in your tag teams which is actually also good because um currently the the meta for tag would be you have there your your um green land team you have your also your what do you call this stories you have your wasted red and now you have the number so but this actually these passives take the number to a different to another level as well so my only you know my only um sentiment here is um if you have a number you can actually pull for him but if you don't have a number um you can still pull for him he's still good in in pvp up sorry in pve content i've used him in in what do you call this in almost all of um my pve content before the chapters before when i was starting so he is really a good car uh good hero to have so let's move on to his um i think he has another uh what do you call this upgrade so his s1 it's master's tempering so instead instead of having him at two mana mana cost now he is at three so the effect also increased the buff this also is another buff so it increased from 20 to 28 percent the third duration is still the same so again another buff to hurt your enemies really hard so i'm sure that um some of you guys are still skeptical about this um i would be too i think we should you know consider play testing him first but based on the amount of buffs that he gives your team and if he's also buffed by buffed by linombe signature force i don't think you could go wrong with him plus his s1 this skill master's tempering is also it also depends on how big his attack is so on it depends on how you skill is attacked uh the the damage would be so again um signature force can help you along the way um improve mar assist at attack stat as well so let's move on so his s2 hasn't changed so it still deals 1050 damage to one enemy so it's still burst five but this is actually a good skill to have um to eliminate you know um tankier enemies to deal more damage so again um his kit right now um increases attack it's an over overload or overdose of attack increase attack really um one of the first bangas that i've enjoyed using was actually more um hands down until i got the rest of the the banga family uh after after tantalo so he he was one of the the members of the banga family that i enjoyed using uh before uh before tantalo came out so he is actually viable very viable for pve now and more viable in pve and for pvp you can consider him if you're using again linombe so um for those who don't you know who haven't who haven't had who haven't built their linombe team you can still pull for him but it's not really a priority for you more on those who have linombe heroes or focusing on linombe as a nation for their heroes so let's move to his uh oh sorry he is a black fate core as well so the chance that the the chance for you to pull him is 0.7 percent which is a higher percentage so you can actually pity pull him for 19 core millages um if you have extra you know um zess you could really pull for him if you need a attack uh a attack buffer um that can support your team he can actually be used in any other team it's not only linombe but he will be he would be scaled more when he's with linombe it's it's it's it's more easier to scale his attack stat when he's with linombe okay so for his exclusive weapon metallic breaker um the usual weapon so obtain morris attack plus 30 so you know now has plus 30 and um morris equip cp or combat power is plus 3000 and additional stack bonuses as well but i'm not really um recommending that you pull for his weapon um it's just that you have a similar um chance for it to drop than the fate core so use your sets for the fate core not so much for the weapon unless he's really your favorite character so that's just it so my final thoughts on morris um very good all-around buffer now he's more you know i think he stands out of of all the um the hero buffers out there because of his overload or overdose of of buffs particular in his passive in s1 so i think you should give him a try if you have xs but if you have linombe as your hero as your nation priority i think you should pull for him um he's he's actually good with all the additional stats that he gives you okay so right in the comment below guys if you're going to pull for him if you're not going to pull for him if you're if you're adding him to your linombe uh team or or a group of heroes um please sorry please let me know in the comments below um also uh what do you call this please do subscribe to my channel um been putting out the consistent content for xos heroes so it do it does really help my channel if you do subscribe and you always stay safe take care of everyone and this is the warden and i'm out


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How do I apply for a student visa to legally teach English in Italy? In some European countries, including Italy, it can be notoriously difficult for non-EU citizens to find teaching jobs. Language schools can be reluctant to undertake the often laborious task of obtaining a work permit when they can simply hire a teacher from within the EU who requires no documentation. One option open to non-EU teachers is to apply for a student visa that allows you to legally work in a language school for up to 20 hours per week. To supplement this income, many teachers also take on private students in their free time which should enable you to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle while living and working in Italy. How to apply The process of applying for a student visa can take up to a month to be processed. You will need to visit your nearest Italian consulate in person to submit the required documents. Before applying, you should ensure that your passport is valid for a minimum of 6 months after you're staying in Italy is completed. You also need to enroll on a study program such as an Italian language course that is recognized by the Italian government. The required documentation may vary but the typical requirements are Completed application form Valid passport Additional passport photo Photocopies of passport ID pages Documentation regarding the study course in Italy Proof of finances Either a bank statement showing access to US$1,000 per month during your stay Or an authorized document from a parent or similar declaring responsibility for providing the funds Health insurance documentation Proof of round trip flights Proof of accommodation during your stay To ensure you have everything in place, it is recommended that you visit the website of your nearest consulate to check the exact details of any documentation required. On arrival Once you have received your student visa and are on the ground in Italy, you then need to apply for a residence permit. Your application should be made at a local post office within 8 days of your arrival in the country. Processing time can be up to 3 months and requires the following documents Completed application form Obtained from post office Valid passport plus copies of ID and visa page Four passport photos Text stamp Obtained from post office Acceptance letter from study program Public health insurance 49 euros for 6 months 98 euros for 12 months Obtained from post office Once your application is sent, you also need to apply for a tax number through the government tax department. If you supply all the necessary documentation throughout the application process, things should run smoothly. However, it is by no means certain that every application will be approved, so it is important that you follow the instructions supplied by the Italian consulate to the letter.


Hi, Dr. Jared here, and I wanted to do a product review with you. This is brought to you by Pediatric Dental Seminars, and today I want to talk about computer aided electronic local anesthetic delivery devices, so I was introduced to this. The first one here was actually the DeniPen by Septidon, and I was introduced to this at the Greater New York Dental Meeting, and they said, you have to have this product. And I said, I can give painless injection already. So they ended up sending me this as a 30-day demo. I kept it, and I immediately bought a second one of these, and this is a great device at your office. This has been wearing out a little bit now, so I've been looking for a replacement to use, and I saw this on the cover of Practicon. It is actually the Woodpecker, so it is another device similar to the DeniPen, and this will also work with the needle of your choice and the local anesthetic of your choice. I also do buffer my anesthetic as well to help with the comfort of the injection. Use laughing gas most of the time, but the kids will see if I can get this open today. So the nice thing about this one is it doesn't have battery, so it will charge on its own with its lithium-ion battery. So when you get it, it will come in a box, and you'll have the injection device, and then this is the stand that will charge it. And it will also come with some sterilizable equipment as well here that you'll be able to hold your injection device. So this really does give a lot more comfortable injection to the kids, so you'll have these little devices, and you'll go ahead and attach the needle of your choice to them. And then you can use your normal local anesthetic. You're not going to have added cost like you would with a device like the wand, so you'll be able to sterilize this part. This will go in, and then I think this one's not charged, so that's the new one. And then you'll be able to go ahead and you'll turn the device on. It'll load here, and it'll have different speeds, so there's a slow speed that can be adjusted as well as a high speed, so this is just going to be determined based on the injection you're going to be giving. So depending on if you're doing a block, you might want to go a little faster versus infiltration or an anterior injection a lot slower, and it'll play music. It'll aspirate if you hold down the button as well, so that can be useful when you're going ahead and get, you want to use one of these that can aspirate. So love these devices. That's my feedback on this one. I would highly recommend that you adopt one of these if you're treating kids at your office. This one's just, you can get one that does the PDL injection for around 700. This one doesn't do the PDL injection, but it's a nice device. It's just under $400. It's not going to break the bank. And if you think about one lost operative appointment versus this device, I mean, you're already making your money back by keeping that kid comfortable in the chair. So hope to do more of these, and I hope you enjoyed. And hopefully you can adopt one of these at your office.


Degradation and desertification are serious issues for Burkina Faso. Around 470,000 hectares of land are degraded each year through a combination of natural and human factors.  The result? Formably, arable farmlands are transforming into desert with devastating human and environmental consequences. However, activists like El-Haje Zarome-Lasane are working hard to turn things in the other direction. A farmer from the village of Gasolkoli in the Tangomayel district of Som province in the Sahil region of Burkina Faso, he's been working on restoration since 1993. My name is Bobby Kasinga. I'm from the village of Keteria. I'm from the village of Bishrula. I'm from the village of Keteria. I'm from Burkina Faso. I'm from Burkina Faso. I'm from the village of Burkina Faso. He's personally restored 10 hectares of completely naked and barren land and played a major role in mobilizing his village to do the same, resulting in around 200 hectares of total restoration in the area. However, at the beginning it was not easy and villagers laughed at him, but he believed in his ancestors' wisdom. Zarome's own commitment, hard work and generosity have also played a major role in the restoration success. He invests significant amounts of his own resources into the work, spending up to 180 US dollars a year buying trees and hiring people to help him with the restoration activities on his land. He's readily offered his knowledge and skills and free seedlings from his nursery to other villagers. Since 2003, he's been supported by local NGO, Topolga. When we took Zarome, it was not the commitment of the entire village who supported him, and the only one who supported him was his courage and will. Word of Ghassel Kohli's restoration success is spreading. This is welcome news for Zarome, who strongly believes that widespread effort is needed to halt or reverse desertification. He's hopeful that partners and actors within the Great Green Wall for the Sahara and Sahil Initiative, GGWSSI, can attract the means to help make this kind of large-scale restoration happen. Adama Dolcombe, senior staff at the Ministry of Environment, Green Economy and Climate Change of Burkina Faso, a national coordinator for the Great Green Wall of the Sahara and Sahil Initiative, is confident that achievements on the ground, like that of Zarome, show that it's possible to green the Sahil. I think that the example of Zarome is quite different because we feel that it's a leader who is convinced and who wants to bring other actors to marry the activity I was in, in a vision of a fairly rapid scale of these good practices. Our role is to accompany these actors so that they can fully play their role. Topolga and the GGWSSI are now setting up an intensive training in leadership, restoration technique and raising awareness for village leaders across the Sahil region. For this, we have organized a training with the Great Green Wall, which has been an intensive training for volunteers, volunteers who are going to engage in their entourage, their friends, their parents so that each one has a different degree depending on their capacity, each one tries to do something in their village to recover the land. And so that at some point, we have in each village a critical mass of people who fund the recovery. Back in Gasolkoli, Zarome will continue to plant and is committed to sharing his knowledge and passion with whoever he wants to learn.