Hello everyone!
Hope that you all had a pleasant week. This week was an
exciting one for the project as we got to meet all the board members and start
their training! As I will explain later, the reasons for not posting in so long
was that all of our training sessions got moved ahead a few days, and we have
been very busy trying to keep up with that as a result.
The first meeting was held on Monday in the afternoon.
Things started off a little slowly as we hadn’t realised how much longer it
would take with a translator (combined with the often long winded way of
talking in Luo) and because most people showed up 30 minutes late. Thankfully
they generally enjoyed our “icebreaker” activities to introduce everyone. Ours
consisted of us passing around a roll of toilet paper for everyone to take a
few pieces while they told everyone else their name, village, why they took on
the position and answered the question: if you could be any animal, what would
it be and why. The animals and reasons given were very interesting. Two people
would be cows so that they could produce milk to support everyone, and one of
the board members said she would be a hen to make eggs that she could sell. Two
of them said that they would be rabbits because they are smart. One of my
favourite answers was to be a giraffe so that she could look far ahead and to
plan. My favourite answer however was to
be a lion so that he could protect the bank from any danger. Once we had gone
around the circle we then informed everyone that they would have to share one
skill they would bring to the board, for each square of toilet paper they had
taken before. Unfortunately because everyone took at least 10-12 squares we had
to limit the number at 4. They thought it quite funny that they had all taken
so many pieces.
The rest of the training session worked through explaining
some of the boring process stuff that we had to get out of the way before
getting into the role of the board for the year ahead. Based off their
questions we could tell that this was the part that they were most interested
in, and they seemed to appreciate the balance we struck between detail and
ambiguity about their roles. We don’t want to make their roles too defined so
that it seems like a chore, but rather to give them some space to keep their
position engaging and fulfilling.
The rest of the meeting was spent working through some brainstorming
around the best ways of interacting with members, and working through their
first case: The Tea Situation. I believe I wrote up about this in one of my
earlier posts but as a refresher, we struggle with what may seem like a very
minor issue. GIVE generally provides tea at all of our training sessions to the
attendees, but we have found that giving the tea can create a sense of
entitlement and impact the engagement of the participants as a result. Our hope
was to encourage the board members to work together with us to provide all the ‘ingredients’
for us to make tea together. The impact of giving tea would be small, but the
hope was that the impact of us withholding tea and working together to make tea
for ourselves would have a much bigger, positive impact. We are hoping that the
board can work with us towards making the bank self-sustainable, and were
hoping that this would send a positive message in that regard. So, to try and
get to this position of everyone working together to provide tea, we wrote a
case about Frank the miller. The gist of the story was that he was trying to
get the farmers to try a new idea, combining their harvests, to create bigger
batches for him to mill and hence reduce his costs. The hope was that by
working through the case they would see the benefits of working together, and
the challenges of changing what people are accustomed to. The board nailed the
case, providing solutions to our questions that were even better than some of
our answers. However, when we presented our “Tea Situation” to them, they all
laughed and unanimously rejected our idea of coming together to provide tea. Oh
well, we tried!
After a break, with some music and attempts by Katie and
myself at Kenyan dancing, we returned to our session. There was not much left
at this point as we went through the brainstorm I mentioned earlier, before
discussing the training schedule. Unfortunately, there was a conflict with our
last planned session due to a church event and we are planning to go on a
safari the week following the training...so we had to move all of our training
sessions ahead by a few days. This was not ideal in the slightest for us, since
it takes on average roughly 10-12 hours to fully prepare each training session,
and we were only expecting to have two sessions our first week, not three.
However, the ‘customer’ is always right, and it made the most sense to make
those changes so we will have to make due.
We finished the first session by getting the board members
to teach us something in Luo. We decided upon learning how to count, so that we
wouldn’t get ripped off by people at the market as often, which they thought
was quite funny! They also thought it was hilarious to hear us trying to learn
the numbers, and it will be one of my goals to completely learn them before the
end of the training sessions.
Following the training session we were quite pleased with
how it had gone. The board members seem to all be very competent and
intelligent leaders in the community who are very committed to the bank. They
also seem to respond well to our attempted teaching style. We are certainly
learning a lot as we go considering that neither of us has run training
sessions such as these before, let alone for the board of directors of a bank.
Thankfully we have good bodies of knowledge to fall back on in the form of my
camp staff training experience, Katie’s parents and my own parents, in addition
to our GIVE support team back in Canada and the UK. The other members of the
house have also been very helpful at providing a fresh set of eyes and opinions
on various aspects of our training which we have been struggling with.
Anyways we spent a good dinner that evening catching up with
the rest of the travellers before getting back to work on the upcoming training
sessions for much of the night and the next day. We have been working hard but
also making sure to save some time for reading, exploring, and hanging out with
the other travellers. Our dinner table discussions continue to be interesting
and continue to cover vast subject areas. Still, all being said we are really
looking forward to our day off this weekend. I am especially looking forward to
it because Shahzad and Karim are coming to Kisumu, so I will hopefully be able
to meet up with them for a few hours. (They were my host family in Nairobi)
I will leave my rambling story at this point; to hopefully then
get you all fully caught up this afternoon.
Best,
Graham
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