Training Begins!

With not too many more bumps than should be reasonably expected, my training workshop for drop-in centres began this week and ran for three days. We ended up having between eleven and fifteen people there each day of the week, from eight different drop-in centres. Hopefully, the trainings will continue over the next year into a full program that covers all aspects of running a successful drop-in centre.

The training was a three day workshop on the organization of a drop-in centre (or really any organization--much of the material we used was the same material the trainers use for creche trainings). We covered writing a constitution, vision and mission statements, roles and responsibilities of employees and board members, the definition of management, and a few other related topics. Overall, I think it was pretty successful--the learners learned something and seemed engaged in what we were covering.

That hardly means it ran completely smoothly. The first day, Tuesday, we were supposed to start at eight and didn't end up starting until eleven thirty. Actually, we began at nine, and realized after half an hour that the people in our training room were actually there for a different training taking place in the next room over. Then the administrators at Khanimamba started phoning around and rounding up the people who said they were going to come, and we managed to actually start after a late tea break. We still ended up with a decent showing, though, and several of the people promised to bring other people from their organization the next day.

Which they did! Day two we had our peak attendance, fifteen people. We were planning the sessions a bit by the seat of our pants, as the trainers and I had a different idea of what the title of the course meant. In the end, I think that their interpretation, which covered some very basic practical topics that are mainly listed above, was the right call. I also didn't realize that I would have two trainers doing the sessions with me, though it was definitely helpful that there were as they both had a habit of wandering away just before their presence might be useful, and I needed them to translate and clarify much of the part of the workshop I ran.

Anyway, we kept adding things to the agenda of day two during the morning of day two. There was a couple extra hours of padding built into the schedule that I had made because I figured we would start late (which we did, but only one hour this day) and that one of our trainers would take more than her allotted time because she is very garrulous when in front of the classroom (that's okay, the learners like her and she explains things well). However, with three extra topics added on, we ended up having to move half the day two agenda to day three. At the end of the day, we had the following conversation:

Elisa: Tsakani, why do you think we ran so late?

Me: Well, we did start an hour late.

Elisa: Mmm. And we had to spend a lot of time explaining things, because this is all new to them.

Me: Mmm. Yes, that. And of course, we added three extra sessions. That might have been why we didn't finish the agenda.

Elisa: Ohhhh.

But day three we easily made it through the agenda, even though once again Elisa took way more than the time allotted. I had given myself three hours to do a session that should only take an hour, so even with starting late, we were home free.

Even though the sessions were pretty successful, it wouldn't have been nearly so much without Elisa and Emma, our trainers, since the learners had a lot of trouble understanding what I was saying. My American accent takes some getting used to, and I had to adjust to speaking a lot slower than I think of as a reasonably slow presentation speaking voice, as well as constantly modify the way I phrased things to make things easier to understand. A lot of nuance was lost--I had to translate "enthusiastic" to "excited" for one exercise which was interpreted by the learners as over-excited, and therefore a bad thing to have in employees--but it improved over the course of the week.

Running a training course in rural South Africa is also a lot different than running a training with Americans. Exercises that I had originally planned as group brainstorming, for example when defining abstract terms like "leadership," that would have ended in a laundry list of alternate definitions, had to be done backwards. We did small group work where the laundry list we would have created at the end was made up beforehand, and the learners had to assess whether the things on the list were good or important and why or define them or some such. This is because people aren't used to critical thinking because of the way the education system is and therefore first, don't participate and second, don't give very thought-out answers when they do participate. The language barrier doesn't help either--one of my favorite participants defined the difference between planning and organizing as, "planning is when people get together and plan, and organizing is when people get together and organize." I knew she had more to say than she was able to express, but....well, welcome to my week. A lot of the brainstorming resulted in jargon that the people speaking didn't understand but either saw in their handouts or remembered from earlier sessions; people would sit debating alternate spellings of a word (both wrong) instead of spending the time at hand. I learned very much to appreciate my own education this week, even more so than I had before.