Nutrients

Oops, somehow an entire month went by without any blog posts...and let's face it, the one saying I was going to MST doesn't really count...sorry, guys. By guys I mean the handful of relatives who actually care how often I update. I've done some sort of interesting stuff that I'll try to start posting about, but writing just never seemed that appealing. I'll work on being better.

We started a two-day training session on nutrition today. Today's class covered the basics of food groups and healthy cooking, and tomorrow we'll be working on applying that knowledge to the drop-in centre menus.

Food groups in South Africa are pretty widely known. Unlike in the US, where we are taught four basic food groups, South Africa teaches three: energy (carbohydrates and fat), body-building (protein), and protective (fruit and vegetables). You can see a poster for them on every clinic, school, or creche wall. We've tasked the drop-in centres with making their own, using magazine pictures to illustrate different examples of food. Khanimamba is sort of in love with projects that help centres create educational wall posters.

However, basically none of the drop-in centres I've visited so far actually applies that knowledge to their menus. Most serve vuswa (pap, or maize porridge) with some sort of protein source, no vegetables. Some centres have a vuswa and cabbage day. I went to one that was serving vuswa and potatoes. It was a carbohydrate orgy. It was also my lunch. Tomorrow, therefore, they will be revising their menus and writing up budgets for them.

Remember that many of the kids who attend these centres are HIV positive and/or have other illnesses, making basic nutrition and a healthy diet even more important than for the general population.

On to my fun anecdotes from today.

I blew the minds of my trainees not once but twice today. It's so much fun when I blow their minds. They think I'm lying to them. Here are the facts I imparted:

1. Bicarbonate of soda (baking soda) is bad for vegetables. (I'd never heard of putting baking soda in vegetables before moving to SA. Do other people do this?)

2. You can eat potato peels. In fact, potato peels contain half of a potato's nutritional value (NOT as some Americans have tried to tell me its entire nutritional value).

It took a lot of convincing, including Elisa's very vocal support (and I'm pretty sure the potato peel thing was new information for her too...), but I'm reasonably sure that some people believed me. Of course, I also believe that deep-frying my potatoes is bad for me and I do so anyway on a somewhat regular basis, so we will see if anything changes.

I also bonded with the trainers today about how much we hate the colored chalk the administrators bought. My hands are still yellow, and despite sponging down I don't think the blackboard will ever be the same--the blue chalk isn't even visible. And the box they got was enormous.

Rockstar Moments

It should surprise none of you that I can be a really lazy updater. Sometimes, this is because I am busy. Sometimes, this is because I don't feel like I have anything to write about. Sometimes I'm just being lazy. But I wanted to write about a cool afternoon during the training session on gardening that we did last week, even though more than a week has elapsed, unfortunately due more to not feeling like writing than to being crazy busy.

If you have been following this past year's chronicles, you will have noted ongoing struggles to express myself and be understood in both Tsonga and English. This has been coming to a point recently, as the current crop of trainees aren't managers but cooks and gardens who speak less English than I do Tsonga. And then, while I was teaching them cool gardening techniques and factoids, I stumbled upon a solution trained by many years of 64 shades of crayola and infinite plastic cases of watercolors. D'oh. So I drew everything.

I am particularly proud of the chart I drew of Garden Pests and Friends. My pictures, except for the aphid (partly, I'm not one hundred percent sure I know what aphids look like, and partly I'm not sure that aphids are indigenous to South Africa...ditto for the ladybug, though it was a very well rendered ladybug if I do say so myself) were totally legible and everyone knew what I was talking about. True, the explanation of why earthworms are a Garden Friend was a little prolonged despite my awesome pictures of the worm eating mulch and pooping plant food (I know it's a simplification, don't start), but still so cool. I felt like such a rockstar, aided in no small part by the multicolored water soluble markers I was using. You know, the kind you can stack into a lightsaber and have duels with during elementary school. If the papers are still around, I'll take pictures of them at the office next week.

Currently, things are quiet. It's easter week, which means nothing is happening at the office. At home there is a construction project going on in our backyard to expand the raised bit. This usually starts very early in the morning right outside my window, which is of course no end of fun to wake up to. It's just a bunch of concrete bricks spaces out now, I don't know when they're going to get around to filling it in with mud and cow poo.

Happy Passover/Easter, everyone.

Life is Full of Surprises

Surprise One. Last week the training workshop we did had not fifteen but seventy-five learners. Seventy-five! Way too many for one classroom. So, we split them up, putting the fifteen who had been to a workshop before in one class and the sixty new people in another. I worked with the sixty new people, which was exhausting and I missed my old learners, but…now another twenty-odd drop-in centres know the ins and outs of how to write an organization’s constitution and a few other useful things. Despite the massive quantity of extra people, this session actually went smoother than last time, as we had ironed out some of the bumps and I had adjusted to speaking at a pace and in a manner that people better understood.

Surprise Two. The drop-in centres have a functioning networking committee now, which I found out today when they came to Khanimamba to have their monthly meeting. I sat in on their meeting, which they used to plan a calendar for the rest of the year, including events for the OVCs like a netball tournament and an awareness campaign. A pleasant surprise.

Surprise Three. Tomorrow we are visiting drop-in centres. We are leaving from town at 7 am. I have never actually arrived in town this early before. It seems logical that they wouldn’t have planned to meet this early if the taxis didn’t run then, right?

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.