Crazy Times: How I Hate The Internet Here

Well well well...

It's been a while since I have posted something on here. I know that some are wondering if I have died and others have thought that I have stoped. We'll neither of those things have happened (although the death one seems to have been a close one).

Let's just say my abscense has been a combination of a few factors:
-incredibly busy with work
-terrible internet connection here in Kitwe which has limited my photo uploading
-tons of traveling

These things together have limited my time at the computer and time to reflect and get out my thoughts.

Let's start with work.

Why the hell have I been so busy?

Capacity building. That's what I have been trying/doing with my co workers. An easy way of understanding capacity building is to think of it like training/teaching. To help my coworkers in areas where they asked or recognized that they could use some improvement in.

First thing I/We (I use we because everyone was doing this) did was conduct an assessment of my coworkers using something called a "market facilitation self assessment tool". Because my focus area is market facilitation this tool was developed solely to look at factors in market facilitation. Each person was to evalute themselves and then give me back the tool so I could look at the results and try to understand where the weaknesses were.

Think of being a foatball coach and getting your team to do a specific set of drills in order to see where they are all at. Once everyone did all the drills you see where all the low socring happened and make some exercises or trainings based on those weaknesses.

Thats pretty much what I did with my feild staff.

From the results of the assessment tool I came to the following focus areas in which is developed my workshops around:-Trust building with farmers and buyers-Data management for agriculture and reports-Coacing for leadership-Personal and Professional Development
For 2.5 weeks I researched and planned the hell out of these workshops (funny thing is, even up to the night before I was still scrambling to make facilitator notes and prepapre. Bed at 11pm, midnight ish. Up at 5am) which is what really pulled me away from communication in my life.

On top of the research I was doing my office asked me to conduct some market research here in Kitwe. This consisted of going to different restaurants and institutions and collecting data on what they buy in terms of fruits and vegetables, how much and what they pay for them. The goal of this is to develop a database so when the farmers we are working with are able to do farming in a more buisness like manner they can cater to all these markets. I feel like this is interesting but there needs to be a lot of work done with the farmers before this information can be useful.

Round 1

Everything came together on the 28th and 29th (Tuesday and Wenesday) and I had my presentations. Tuesday morning I held the Trust Building with Farmers and Buyers for two hours. During that time we talked about the fundamentals of trust, how do we define trust, how it is built, examples of trust in our lives, trust we have with farmers and buyers right now and tried to develop strategies for trust building in the future.

This session went alright, I had a hard time getting the big picture across altough I did get my major points across: Trust is built from a mutual understanding thus we need to help create a better understanding for farmers and buyers, Trust is built from a proven track record (past events) and Trust takes time to build. Every got a solid understanding of those points but I feel that my co workers did not really get why we were doing it and to be honest I don't know either other than they indicated low scores on trust building capabilities on their assessments.

Lesson learned: Need to target trainings not only to test scores but to voiced demand.

Round 2

Data Management for Agriculture and Reports. This session was a huge fucking hit. What I did was create a bunch of excel exercises within the realm of small scale farming. The goal was to get my coworkers to understand the math functions in excel, I see Chesiba using his calculator after he put data in excel. Little does he know with a few clicks excel does EVERYTHING for you.
Here is an example of a question we did together.

The Savoy hotel buys lots of different fruit every week. Using excel calculate how much it spends on fruit at the end of the month. Assume each week it buys the same amount.
Apples: 59 kg at 2000k/kg
oranges: 43kg at 5000k/kg
bananas: 100kg at 3450k/kg

Funny story: There are 3 people who work in this office. Aggie, Chesiba and Mwakoi. To me each are highly capable and I did not really know where they would be with respect to excel. I pictured them all to be a 4 out of 10. When we started I realized quickly that Chesiba and Mwakoi were a 2 while Aggie was a 8. She was like a child screaming "BOOORRRRIINNNGGG" and took my excerceise page and started doing everything on her own until she had a problem and called me over.

Although everyone was at different levels they all enjoyed this workshop. So much so they want more of these problems to work on because they claim it to be very very very useful. I got to show Aggie how to make graphs for her report and she told me that if she was going to remember for one thing it would be this. I felt pretty awesome after that.

Lesson learned: When making lessons for anything, if you can relate what you are teaching to similar things in that persons' everyday life it will become more accessible.

Round 3:

Wenesday. Day 2 of training.

The first day was a more participatory day. Participatory is used when the lessons require high amounts of participitation from the "students". Today's lessons were more traditional listen and ask some questions.

The mornings' workshop was about Coacing for Leadership not only because it scored low and their was a verbal demand from my coworkers but there are TONS of opportunities for them to use coaching skills in this project (RPI).

EWB has a great coacing handbook which was my main tool for this workshop. I pretty much just tore apart the workbook and made a workshop from it. We covered topics from "what is coaching" to "coaching skills" to "tools and models in coaching". Throughout the sessions we got into som great discussions about how coaching can be used here and how they are already using it but never realized it. It was great. The session ended up running late but that was cool.

Lesson: Sessions run really well when the content you have is great. Good content = Good session.

Round 4: The round that did not happen.

This is what happens when you burn yourself out.

After 3 nights of staying up till midnight and getting up at 5am this was bound to happen.
By the end of lunch I was out of it. Talking in front of a group of people and engaging discussion and exercises takes a whole lot of me. I started off the last workshop called "Personal and Professional Development" which was meant to be an easy going workshop figure my co workers would be tired of hearing me talked got flipped upside down when I was the one who could barely talk let alone make any sense.

I wanted talk about the advantages of personal development and what it means and how you can incorporate it into your work life here. I was going to use the idea of personal development plans to emphasize this and give of an example of how it works. Oh well, there is still 10 days of works left....oh my haha. 10 days is not much.

Lesson: Don't burn yourself out.

Funny I write that because last week in Livingstone I got into a discussion about work and burning oneself out. I was arguing how I would rather be busy all the time then take rests. I feel as if the work culture I have been used to for the past 5 years has always been about working yourself to the bone. I will rest when I am dead. Looking back at all my jobs they all were all composed of long work days (15 hours) 50% of the time. Yet they required very little critical thought, just the act of my body being there was enough. Having a job that requires mental capacity is really different. I would have never thought that thinking burned you out so much.
I still want to work hard and don't really appriciate rest....yet. I am thinking about it more. Espcially when my health is the shits. I find it rather funny how powerless I feel.

Well that was all the work I have done.

What's up next for me?

With 11 days of work remaining I need to get the following done:
-continue work on creating a strong connection with the development group at the university here "Mellenium Development Goals"
-Develop two more days of workshops per the request of my co workers.
-Visit Stravendale farms-Finish the market research here in Kitwe and Ndola
-Develop some sort of Database for the information

Yow...lots of work.
Should be fun.

Well.
Next blog post will be on Livingstone. I will as if I should take a break. Don't want to burn myself out.
Hahaha.
Chyea.
Tony


ps. i realize now at the internet cafe that i did not spell check this. oops.

pps. i have photos to post but the internet here is shit. thus. no photos.
sorry.