New Blogger Beginning

Nearly three years have passed since my last posting (a shamefully long time ago). As changes to my blog reflect, I am no longer in Argentina. My new home is Port-au-Prince, Haiti where I work for CARE International as an advisor on education and gender. Music is still a huge part of my life with some changes. Jane Kellum & Don Casalaspro is now JKDC (the need to spell out both Kellum and Casalaspro on radio, television, and other mediums became quite tiring, tedious, and well confusing for all involved). This is a certifiably boring post, but it is my new blogger beginning....

SNEAK PREVIEW OF NEW MUSIC FROM "Living: Two Sides of Same Story Chapter One

Well, the calendar year is winding down, but we are now starting to move forward with our music. Please have a listen to three songs from our soon-to-be released album, "Living: Two Sides of the Same Story Chapter I". Look to left for our Music Player. Please leave us a little comment letting us know what you think on our website at www.janekellumandcasalaspro.com.


Enjoy and thanks!!!

Love...

Official Jane Kellum & Don Casalaspro Website!!!

Hi all...this will be a brief update. Andrés and I now have our official website for Jane Kellum & Don Casalaspro. Hope you like. Busssyyy...

www.janekellumandcasalaspro.com

Love to all!!!

Check out music from Jane Kellum & Don Casalaspro

Crazy life music, work, love in Buenos Aires

Hi all..well it's been a LOOONNNGGG time. Big surprise. I"ve been on a non-stop trip to music land in the last two months. Andrés and I embarked upon a album making journey that has almost come to an end. We are in the final stages of production. The album cover is printed and ready to be packaged, and Andrés is doing the final mixing and mastering of the album. We're taking INDIE music to whole new level!!!

Our album is on pre-sale right now for folks to buy before the official release date (TBA--most likely beginning of November 2010)! You can either email me directly at janekellummusic@gmail.com to pay with check or money order or go to our online store at MyFavoriteBand and pay with PayPal. www.myfavoriteband.com/janekellummusic.

Besides the music, I am finishing up a six-month intensive personal development experience which entailed a lot of "facing reality" about who I truly am. There were ups and downs along the way during this experience that I completed in a team of nine wonderful people. Accepting that I don't know what I don't know takes a lot of courage, and I'm still learning what that means.

Andrés and I are doing great and learning about love together each day...

On the work end, I've been working on a pro-bono basis as a Program Development consultant at La Casa del Encuentro (www.lacasadelencuentro.org), an organization that works to prevent and eliminate violence against women and children (gender-based violence) and especially the trafficking of women and children for sexual exploitation. Currently, we are working on a proposal that will specifically target prevention of child trafficking for sexual exploitation in the northern region of the country. If all goes well, I should be dedicating myself fully to this project beginning next year.

I've got a cat now as well so I guess that means I am pretty settled here in Buenos Aires...something I never thought could happen. That's the beauty of life (and paradox)....we end up in places "unimaginable" if we let ourselves simply imagine...

Love to all....

Jane

Official Website: www.janekellumandcasalaspro.com
MySpace: www.myspace.com/janekellummusic
Blogger: www.janekellumandcasalaspro.blogspot.com
Google Buzz: janekellummusic@gmail.com
Facebook: Jane Kellum & Don Casalaspro Fan Page
Twitter: janekcasalaspro

Workin' Life of Buenos Aires

It certainly has been a long time since I last wrote and LOTS has happened. Let's see...I made the decision to stay in Buenos Aires indefinitely because, well, love calls. Andrés and I are now happily moved into our new house with a huge balcony. We've got a cat and a stove now so I suppose you could say that I am sufficiently domestic for the time being. :-)

Andrés and I are busily working on the music. Our studio is each day closer to being ready to record its first album..yes...ours! Jane Kellum & Don Casalaspro's "Living" should be released by the end of the year. You can follow all of our musical on-goings:

MySpace: www.myspace.com/janekellummusic
Blogger: www.janekellumandcasalaspro.blogspot.com
Google Buzz: janekellummusic@gmail.com
Facebook: Jane Kellum & Don Casalaspro Fan Page
Twitter: janekcasalaspro

In my free time (ha ha), I have begun to work on a consultancy basis with an NGO called the Casa del Encuentro. It assists women in situations of violence and girls/women who have been trafficked into sex slavery. Besides case managing, I am working on writing a program development strategic plan and have two proposals in the works. It is very grassroots organization that does amazing work with these women/girls and their family and friends. This summer I"ll have another consultancy gig coordinating the Buenos Aires internship program for a small college in the U.S. My other work includes teaching language arts and social studies, math, science, and ESL to people of all ages ranging from 4th grade to adult. This piece-meal professional situation is both challenging and rewarding; while I spend sometimes up to four hours travelling in this huge city each day, I have the opportunity to understand better the life of professionals in Buenos Aires and the chance to be part of so many different projects.

I've started French once again in la Universidad de Buenos Aires and continue to practice yoga.

Uff...this is all keeps me busy just like I like it. :-)

I am still alive and about to finish my Rotary World Peace Fellowship

Unfortunately, I did not keep up with the blog as much as I wanted to during my time in Senegal. Thus, true to form, I am going to give a brief overview of the last, oh, two and half months.

After writing my last posting about inspiration, I continued to push forward with rallying support for the Maids Project with some positive results. In the end, a new organization, 10,000 Girls, has agreed to take on the project and implement it as a pilot project of the self-sustainable model that it uses in its major programs in Fatick and Kaolack, Senegal. Basically, the idea is, in addition to providing literacy, basic education, and reproductive health education, to offer vocational skills training and micro-enterprise opportunities to the girls and young women in such a way that they gain the knowledge and abilities needed to manage the project themselves and earn at least some of the funds necessary to keep in running. 10,000 Girls has already done this in Fatick and Kaolack and is internationally recognized for this approach which genuinely engages the beneficiaries as partners.

Having this organization on-board as the managing agency is important to our chances of winning a nearly $260,000 grant from the Human Network Senegal, a partnership program of the Japanese Agency for International Cooperation (JICA). I spent a solid week adapting the general project plan that I devised to meet the criteria of the JICA Request for Proposal. I think that the final product is solid and that we have an excellent shot at receiving the funds. We will know by mid-October.

Besides work I have done some travelling within Senegal and in Mali with a wonderful friend from Portland, Donna. The Senegal travels include my trip to St. Louis, the previous capital of Senegal, and the National Park Langue de Barbarie. I also visited the "Pink Lake", which gets its name from the color that it takes on when the sun hits it due to the high salt content. The local Senegalese extract the salt from its bottom for sale.

Mali was amazing and a true adventure. Think amazing people who sincerely wanted to help us out and share a little bit of their lives with us. Think travelling up the Niger River for three days on a cargo boat to Tomboutou (Timbuktu) and risking our lives to climb out the side of the boat and traverse the 1 inch ledge to the back of the boat every time we wanted to go to the bathroom. Think sleeping on grain sacks and eating a strange gruel with an unsure source of its rather unpleasant taste. Think delicious street beignets, lamb kabobs, fried plantains, pounded millet with sauce made from the Baobab tree…hmmm. Think trekking up and down through the escarpment now inhabited by the Dogon people and seeing some the most beautiful scenery: vast plains, waterfalls, fields of millet, brilliant red rock formations. Thinking riding a camel into the Sahara to watch the sunset in Timboutou. In short, it was an unforgettable trip. This is fortunate given my camera quit working after the second day. :-(

I now have only a few days left in Senegal as an official Rotary World Peace Fellow. Earlier today I submitted my final Rotary report, signaling an end to this particular stage in my life. Today I will say my farewells to my host family and tomorrow my friends at the beach are having a little good-bye get-together for me. Believe it or not some cooler weather and non-beach weekend activities are welcome at this point (yes…even the “beach professional”, as my dear friend Scott has coined me, needs a break from the sand and surf once in a while). ha ha

Thursday night I am off to Europe to travel around Spain, France, Italy, Germany, and I don’t know where else until November 5. Then in November I will return to Argentina for about a month before returning to Oregon for the holidays in December. After that, my plans are somewhat up in the air. Music pursuit is a possibility, but a job with a steady salary also is appealing (and well frankly really necessary…let me know if you hear of anything of interest particularly in Portland! ;-)

That’s all for now….

P.S. Pictures are from my trip to St. Louis, the National Park Langue de Barbarie, and the "Pink Lake" in Senegal