Training and forging for food

I am responsible for starting up a new project on GBV in my duty station, so we basically have to start from scratch and build up.

I just completed a weeklong training for local partner organizations. I was in charge of the last two days to plan and facilitate the workshop. It was so much work to come up with an agenda, develop content and activities for the workshop. I am used to working collaboratively with colleagues, and this was actually the first time that I had to do everything myself from developing a pre and post-test to thinking about some energizers….  For whole two days. When I got positive feedback from the participants, I forget how tired I was. Especially on the last day, I was just ready to collapse!

I have a very nice local colleague from the partner organization, who helped me to interpret at the workshop and translate materials. I was very happy to see how participants (they will be working in GBV programme) were so interested and almost leaning forward to hear what we had to say. When I said “can someone come up and do an energizer?” one of them said “no we don’t need one. We are so interested. We are not falling sleep!”

On one of days, I wore a local skirt (kind of wrap around tight long skirt) that I bought the day before with the local colleague in a market. Participants had such a good laugh as my skirt kept getting loose and my colleague (she is officially my friend at that point) had to come and fix it.

Despite the stress, there were some positive things in addition to the good feedback. One is that I became friends with the colleague. The other is that the training centre had such good food! You know by now things like “local” and “organic” really grab my heart. The training centre is also their agricultural extension centre, so they had locally grown and organic vegetables for lunch. I was getting sick, so my colleague would pick lemons off their trees, so that I can have hot lemon drink for my throat. I also found that they were growing sorrel to eat the leaves. I remember this back in Guyana where they made delicious red juice with this. It tastes like bissup (west African hibiscus juice.) I got permission to collect the flowers, as they were not going to eat this. I dried them in the sun, and I will experiment with this when I go back to YGN. I am now so into forging my own food!