I went up north on Friday for the training on Saturday. The training with teachers volunteering as tutors with the child development program (up north) went well. Everything was based off of discussion and group work. Overall it was a great time with the teachers learning from each other and exploring various aspects of volunteering. For a visual example we used the top of an injera basket. They can come in many colors and are unique to Ethiopian culture. Before we even dug into the good stuff, we talked about the basket- how beautiful it is, how it is woven together, how the unity brings strength, how there are many colors, how there are many threads, etc. We were able to use this example to show how volunteers are one of the important threads that make up this project and the community. Without the unity, the work could not get done- in fact it could potentialy fall apart. The teachers participated and seemed to enjoy the training. My favorite part was when the teachers brought up concrete examples of the importance of volunteers in their community– since that is what it is all about!
I ended up being asked to teach a second training at one of our project sites 2 hours away. It was great because I was able to go back to Simada- which was a site I visited when I first came to ethiopia. I was able to see the the project and catch up with some of the staff that were there a few years ago. One great thing, is they couldn’t belive how much Amharic I know- as compared to before when I knew approximately 1 word. The second training went great and I ended up staying up north for about a week.
