Training Days

If this first month of my JF placement has yielded anything, it is an awareness of, dread of, and ultimate appreciation for training. Since my embarking on this journey, more of my waking hours have been spent in training than in any other activity: of the 5 and a half weeks I have spent as an EWB volunteer, one was ill and locked in my room, and 3 were in training. And now, I have done the inevitable, and shifted from the trainee to the trainer. This past Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I worked with the PARED team to design and implement a training on the Canadian Initiative for Food Security (CIFS) proposal development, the next project we are taking on in approximately a dozen of 190 communities in Northern Ghana. The point of the Initiative is to involve communities in choosing, designing and implementing a project that will reduce or eliminate the number of months they go hungry in a year. The point of the training is to help our team develop the skills to first facilitate this process in the community, then develop it into a proposal to persuade the Canadian government to grant the funds necessary for its completion. I was trained in these skills with a number of my PARED teammates two weeks ago in Tamale; in classical West African fashion, while I fretted and stressed about preparing for delivering this to the rest of the East Mamprusi district, my coworkers refused to worry about it, delivered on the fly, and experienced at least moderate success.

This was, in a most West African fashion, a great learning experience with a steep learning curve. It quickly became clear that the colloquial, fast-talking, metaphor-slinging Canadian Ashley was neither necessary nor useful. A simple, humble, minimalist, confirmatory, laboriously slow-talking West African version took her place. This Ashley converted everything into a question to the audience in a clear attempt to maintain the audience participation necessary for consciousness to continue among them. She ended every second sentence with a variant of “Does this make sense?” or “Do we understand?”. She took pains to tease out explanations, examples, pros and cons, potential challenges and their solutions for every task she posed to the group. She did this because she had no idea what kind of understanding was being reached (if any), but had every terrifying idea of the fallout for the communities and the work made for her if she screwed this up. Essentially, this Ashley had absolutely no clue what the hell she was doing. Luckily, she was told whatever it was she did, she did it moderately well.

Next week we embark on the daunting but exciting process of community entry, building a relationship with people of different tribes and tongues, and helping them to decide on and eventually acquire what they need the most to build their own opportunities. I'm excited to begin; and will definitely keep you all posted.