Workshops galore

Much of the work of the development industry seems to be about holding workshops, and 2 weeks ago (haven't got round to blogging for a while...) my week was fairly typical of this. CTYA' biggest funding partner have finally delivered on the promised funding (about 6 months after the project was due to start), and as any self-respecting NGO would, we started the process with a 3-day orientation workshop.

The workshop itself was somewhat chaotic, with facilitators coming and going a lot, but it was good to get chance to meet the young people who will be carrying out peer education workshops in High Schools around Livingstone in the hope of bringing about the kind of behaviour change needed to stop the spread of HIV.

Young people in Zambia hear about HIV a lot, and research suggests that the level of knowledge that people have is mostly high. This cannot be translating into a change in behaviour though, as the disease is still spreading, especially among young people. It' very hard to change behaviour, but some of the activities that our peer educators will use are very creative. My favourite is giving participants some chewing gum, asking them to spit it out immediately into a single cup and asking them to take back gum chewed by someone else. Obviously everyone thinks it's gross, but might give less thought than that about sharing other bodily fluids with people.

Busy for the first time, I was also asked to facilitate a workshop for VSO the same week. It was nice to have chance to plan and present something myself. We were inducting the employers in Livingstone who will be receiving new volunteers in October. I asked them to imagine what it would be like to move to Iceland and asked them to please be gentle with their new staff! I'm excited about meeting the new volunteers, but it's strange to think that I'm starting to be an old hand when I still spend so much time confused about the world!