Important Business

Hello again,

I apologise for not getting another post up yesterday, I ended up got side tracked by important business (watching Lord of the Rings with the rest of the house).

As I mentioned yesterday, we spent most of Tuesday preparing for the training sessions on Wednesday and Thursday. As a result there was nothing all that exciting that we did, besides sharing ghost stories around  the dinner table and calling back to Canada earlier in the day to talk with Liz about the project. One issue which had arisen was that following the results being announced we had asked Maurice to call all the nominees to tell them of what had happened, which he agreed to. When asked about it the next day he admitted that he had only called the people who had won, although we had explicitly told him to call everyone, which he had agreed to after a long discussion. He argued that we should hold a meeting for all the nominees to tell them of the results, which we rephrased as basically getting everyone to pay for a matatu ride to the bank only to be told that they didn’t get the position and to give them an opportunity to question us. Needless to say Katie and I explained the reasoning behind us getting him to call all the nominees, and eventually he ‘agreed’ to do that. So on Tuesday we had a good talk with Liz about how to handle that situation, and ended up posted up the results at the bank for everyone to be able to come and see. That night we talked with Maurice about calling the nominees (now 3 days after the elections were supposed to have finished), and he agreed with what we were saying again, however it was only when I told him that we were going to follow up with him the next morning to see how the calls had gone that he clued in to having to call them. Anyways, so that was a bit of a mess, but we have learned a lot which we hope will be put in place next year: namely to post the results immediately following the counting of the ballots, and to make sure that everyone is told the same night. While we had been trying to run the first training session there had been a few nominees walking past the door to the bank a few times to see what was happening, which was disruptive and clearly not positive. Once we posted the results, Katie and I both made sure to talk with any nominees we had met to encourage them to stay involved in the bank and to thank them for running, so hopefully the harm from releasing the results so slowly will end up being minimal.

Wednesday’s training session also ended up going well. We unfortunately had to start an hour late because half of the board members ended up showing up late. We felt bad in that Pamela ended up taking a boda boda (motor bike) to the bank because she had lost track of time and we had been pretty insistent that everyone show up on time. We made sure that we were clear that it was unacceptable for everyone to be so late, and everyone showed up almost on time on Thursday, which was nice as we had run out of time for everything we had wanted to do on Wednesday.

Wednesday’s session opened with an activity called “highs and lows”, where each member shares a high point of their week / day / month and a low point of their week / day / month. The idea being that it allows everyone to get to know each other better, and also puts a boundary around the amount of time spent “catching up” at the start of the meeting. We explained how it should hopefully be a chance for some humour and that the lows should not necessarily be your lowest point, but rather something that you were disappointed with (ie. Your ice cream melted before you could eat it). This moment was fairly touching in the end, two of the board members said that their high was getting to spend time with ‘mazungos’ or white people, as they had never had the chance to before. One of them mentioned that they had not been able to go to school after the first couple grades and this was one of her first chances to do a training session like the ones we are running for the board. Pamela, our housekeeper and a board member, said that her high point was being called Mumma Africa by all of us GIVE travellers. They put my highs and lows to shame (seeing the sun rise as I ran, and my low point being that I finished all my laundry only to realise that I had missed a couple pieces of clothing that I had specifically wanted to wash). Oh well, they still found my low point pretty funny.

Joseph, Joyce, Rose and Maurice (Left to Right) working on a brainstorm

During the first half of the session we focused on community engagement and the second half we focused on goal setting. The community engagement section involved a few role plays of volunteers interacting with Katie or myself acting as a client interested in learning more about the bank, and then a discussion on the importance of saving. We completed the section by having another role play where I was a member basically making demands of Katie as a ‘board member’ to build a new branch in my village, where the board would discuss together how they should respond before I then asked my follow up questions. During the focus groups we found that a lot of people created somewhat of a laundry list for us to do for them, and we wanted to prepare the board for handling those questions. To be honest they did fairly well, and ended up asking for us to prepare them on microcredit so that they can answer questions around why the bank is not currently offering microcredit. We also got each board member to share why they save and how it has impacted their lives. The responses were pretty touching, as many of them now send most if not all of their children to school where they had previously not been able to. One of the board members who was also our translator during the focus groups, Joseph, said that he had used his savings to take his son to the hospital when he was sick. Hopefully the bank can have similar impacts on all the member’s lives!

We opened the second half of the training session with another case study, this time about a women’s group that was set up by an NGO before transitioning to being independent. Once the NGO fully transitioned out however the council running the group started to fall apart because they lost interest or didn’t have the time. We didn’t want the story to be too accusatory, but we felt that it was important to prepare the board for what they could do individually or as a group to keep everyone motivated. They seemed to take it to heart by coming up with some pretty good answers around how they lost sight of the purpose of their positions on the council. This led nicely into goal setting and establishing everyone’s hopes for the year. We took that opportunity to encourage all the board members to aim for great things, but to still be happy with small victories / successes. Hopefully they will take the message to heart.

Fredrick (Black shirt), Pamela (Blue shirt) and Joice (behind Pamela) brainstorming with the help of Sally our translater (white shirt)

Thursday’s session also went pretty well. It was set up to be by far our most difficult and intense session as we covered auditing the bank, budgeting and creating the directional statements for the bank (mission statement, vision statement and organisational values). Auditing and budgeting went fairly well, although it was time consuming and sometimes felt fairly petty. It was good to give the board some time trying to create a budget with the sheets we gave them by interacting with Maurice, as this process will hopefully subtlety reinforce the idea that Maurice should eventually be somewhat responsible to the board. It also gave us a chance to see how they would fill out the budgeting sheet before going over how to do it properly. Hopefully trying it out on their own first was beneficial for them. It did bring up an interesting question which we had not thought about before: how to handle Maurice’s salary. It was clearly a pretty sensitive topic, especially as we know that Maurice gets paid pretty well by us (for doing a lot of work, so it is well deserved) and that we do not specifically separate out how much of his salary is for the bank. For now we have told the board that they will not have to worry about his salary.

Katie leading us through the directional statements

Eventually we got through the auditing and budgeting, and managed to move on to creating the directional statements. Thankfully Katie had read up on creating the statements pretty expensively and was able to walk them through the process and definitions pretty clearly (although they can be pretty ambiguous no matter how well you describe them). We were both thoroughly impressed with how well Sally (our translator) was able to do. We were also very thankful that Diane (who travelled last year and has been helping us a bunch while we are here) suggested we create flash cards to test the board’s understanding of the different statements. They managed to clear up a lot of issues for us. We were super impressed with the statements they came up with, although we have given them some time to finalise the wording. As it stands the mission statement is: To be an institution that nurtures the culture of saving to help low income earners to reach their financial goals. Not bad eh?

Finally we managed to finish the session, almost 4 hours after we had started. I am super impressed with how well they handled all that we threw at them during the session. Hopefully they will now enjoy some well-deserved rest from training over the weekend. Once the training was complete we wearily headed home to relax with the other travellers. It has been a frustrating week for the education team as the zonal officer is being very difficult about permitting them to do condom demonstrations in the schools, as technically speaking it is not allowed by some level of government, although the previous zonal officer had signed off on it for the past 5 years. The nutrition team however had a super productive day as they got to meet with a good number of people and their project finally seems to be catching steam. Fingers crossed that everything will work out well for both of their teams.

On Friday Katie and I spent the morning and afternoon closing out some lose ends from the elections and board training. That evening however, as I mentioned earlier, was given over to Lord of the Rings, which was a nice reprieve for all of us as we treated ourselves to some popcorn (made as a surprise by Syprose and Pamela), chocolate and ice cream.

A windy ride into town

Relaxing in the back of the matatu

 Saturday was Katie and my day off! We had been looking forward to it for a while and promised to not do any GIVE related work all day...making this blog post hopefully doesn’t count. It was hard at times to completely shut out all GIVE work, but it was much needed. We went into town to meet up with Karim, whom I had stayed with while in Nairobi, and to do some shopping. We got to explore a lot of Kisumu which we had never seen before and learned about a restaurant which we now believe is safe: the Laughing Buddha. It was quite delicious. We also managed to explore the open air markets in more detail, as we are both looking for some cloth which Evans can hopefully make into shirts or other such clothes for us. Unfortunately we had no luck however as apparently the cloth stores are closed on Saturdays. It has been surprisingly tough to find the lighter or sheer fabric which we are accustomed to / looking for. Fingers crossed we will be able to eventually.

Near downtown Kisumu

Who needs a mirror when you have a camera?

We also managed to find another super market which has a larger selection of items. While there, we bumped into the account manager which we had been going through at the bank where we deposit the member savings. Ironically this occurred while I was texting a family friend of ours about what services are offered by other banks so that we can keep our options open to switching banks if our current one continues to give us trouble. Once we finished our shopping we spent some time enjoying a relaxing Tusker at a patio outside the grocery store All in all, it was a well needed day of rest which we both appreciated. Tomorrow (Sunday) we will be doing the final prep for our small group audit training sessions on Monday, and our fully board training sessions that we are holding Tuesday and Thursday. It is crazy, but this will be the last intense project week for us. The week after this one we will be going to the Massai Mara for a safari before coming back to the village to have our final touch points with the board, hold Bank Day and write our continuity report. Time flies bye very quickly!

Cheers,

Graham

ps. I will post pictures later, sorry, the power just went out and my battery is only at 15% now
Update: Posted them!