The school holidays are well underway, so I have started my long summer of goodbyes. I had drinks with some frineds last night. One of whom it has taken 5yrs and me choosing to leave the country to arrange to meet up. Today I spent the day with my lovely little niece Ela, and my sister-in-law, Yesim. Ela is only three months old and is gorgeous. I spent the day trying to make her giggle as it was such a lovely sound. Luckily she was very obliging and I got hours of hugs from her. I have plans to see a lot more of them before I go, although, Ela didn't look that fussed when I told her I was going away for a couple of years.
I have had a really busy week since school broke up. I've been gathering documents and finalising preparations and then from Friday morning until yesterday afternoon I was on my final training course in Birmingham (where VSO have their training centre). We've already had a lot of training - a one week on-line course followed by three days face-to-face, one more week on-line and then a quite hefty assignment which had to be handed in last week. This last course was 4 intense days on Skills for Working in Development (or SKWID). I certainly feel more skilled in the art of facilitation and I have learnt a lot about building relationships and identifying stakeholders. There were some very funny role-plays and at times we were feeling quite bamboozled. One particular session really provided me with my "lightbulb" moment. It was called "Building Bridges". We were divided into groups of 6 and given a brief card. This appeared quite straightforward - we worked for an NGO in the capital city, a village some miles away had had its bridge destroyed. We were to design a new bridge. We had 10mins prep, then a village representative would arrive to discuss our plan and then we would have 10mins to complete. Having spent the previous 24hrs learning about stakeholders and doing needs analysis, we quickly set to work considering who our stakeholders were and then creating a range of questions we would ask the village representative. The representative arrived. With a piece of cloth wrapped around her head and a wooden pot on her head and initially - no English. She lurked at the door until I persuaded her in. Then she revealed she could speak English and spent some time quizzing me about my marital status and stroking my hair. I kept at her like a terrier snapping at heels - to no avail. On occasions we had a break-through ("Oh you have brought us some oranges - are they from your village? Do they grow near the river? Do you have to cart them over the bridge?"). But, it didn't matter what we tried - she was not interested in talking about a bridge and we were frustrated thinking we needed to design a bridge. She left, and when she did we finally realised...the bridge was a metaphorical one...we needed to build a relationship with this woman. So when she returned, we didn't mention the bridge and worked on our relationship. Success! We were invited to the village and all was well - we were in! And it turned out the box of building materials were irrelevant. We were just meant to build the metaphorical bridge and nothing else.
It got us all thinking. We had been told we would need to observe for the first couple of months and get to know people. This seems so wrong in our work culture where you jump into action and set about trying to impress people from day one with how much you can achieve in a short space of time. It's not going to be like that in Rwanda - I will need to be-friend people first and then once that friendship exists, people will (hopefully) feel like inviting me in to their lives and I can hopefully partner up with them and we can work together for the changes we hope to achieve.
So, VSO certainly don't send us away as we are just because we all want to go and make the world a better place. It's hard work in the run-up and goodness knows what it will be like when doing it for real! But I am so excited, and I met 7 other volunteers who are going out to Rwanda, so I already have some friends. It's going to be a busy month but the end of the build up is in sight. I fly out at 9pm on Friday 2nd September - eeek!
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