Training Ends

Well, Training is over. We just had our last session of In-Country Training yesterday. In country was a lot more relaxed than the week in Toronto. Toronto consisted of 11-16 hours of sessions a day and sometimes homework in the evening. There was a huge amount of really positive interactive learning happening although the lack of sleep was sub-optimal. We had sessions on everything from Understanding rural livlihoods to the importance of active learning, and from how to avoid dissentry to understanding the economics of agricultural value chains. I walked away from it with a deep desire to make the skills and knowledge of the people in my host community very apparent to them.
Living at the EWB house was classic. There were the ten members of Team Zambia and another eight from Equipe Burkina Faso. It was great getting to practice french and having a sort of warm up cultural splash. I REALLY liked every person in the house a lot. It seems like living with 18 people that some of the roommates would get on your nerves after a while but it wasn't even close. Burkina left a day earlier than us and the house felt really empty we'll miss them all and it will be great to see them again at the return session.
The flight was crazy! We left Toronto for London, had seven hours of layover there, long enough for a whirlwind tour, fish and chips and a pint. Then we flew to Nairobi and had three hours of layover there, we touched down in Lilongwe briefly and finally landed in Lusaka.
Lusaka is pretty interesting, it's not as big as I thought it would be. The markets are very similar to those of Central America and small errands can be exciting adventures. We went over to Hans Hesse's (One of the Zambia Long Term Volunteers) house for supper last night and I talked for a long time to one of his young neighbours. Not only was she incredibly smart but she was just so curious and passionate about learning. She was quizzing me on the processes of conduction, radiation and convection and the process of photosynthesis. She talked about the ethnic origins of people from the different continents and asked me to define poverty. She was only in grade six which really made me reflect on how much effort and passion I had for learning and how blase I was about post secondary. (Initially I took two years off before starting University). I'm not sure if she would get the chance to go to University but she sure would have been more grateful than I was. It hardly seems fair. Hopefully one day access to education will have less barriers and is available to everyone who is a passionate academic.

That's All for now, my next post will probably be from Nyimba

Stay tuned.

Mark