Update on my work

Work, as usual, is keeping me really busy.

In the last week I have kept up with my classes. I have had a lot of fun getting the students to do group work and share songs and games that they learnt as children or that they use with their classes. I am now teaching them to plan a lesson using those games.

The training manual I helped to write has now been published and Thursday afternoon and on Sunday I gave a workshop to 20 participants from all fields such as water sanitation, health services, child protection, social workers, education officers on Early Childhood Development (in particular classroom management, integrating culture into classes, literacy activities, planning and assessment) so that they could return to their regions (there are five regions in the Gambia) and teach ECD teachers skills in workshop. It is a filtered down training approach. It is a big ask - the trainees aren't from an ECD background and in two weeks they are being trained to train teachers - who again will only have a workshop over one or two weeks. It will be interesting to see what impact it has.

My newest project, the impact assessment on Special Needs training, is in full swing. We are now planning a questionnaire that will be used in a focus group discussion to assess how the trainees are using their training.

It is really interesting and I am learning some amazing new skills, but sometimes I wonder if I am going to be able to stop and breath - and also if all my efforts are actually making some sort of difference or I am simply touching on things without really doing them well. The impact of what we do is something that most of the other volunteers question too - although I am really lucky in the variety of things I get to do. Often volunteers are blocked by constraints and can't achieve what they want, though not through lack of effort.