Alex Little

Many of you probably now know that I’ve been accepted a placement with VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) to go and work at Mekelle University (http://www.mu.edu.et/ – though the website availability seems a little erratic!) in Northern Ethiopia, starting Aug/Sept ’08, initially for a year. I’ll be working as an IT advisor, trainer and web developer, helping to train teachers in IT, support their IT infrastructure and developing their elearning programme.

This weekend I’ve just been on my first VSO training course ‘Preparing to Volunteer’, which was excellent fun, though extremely mentally exhausting – very long days, with loads of information about the reasons for development work, why it matters and how it can best be achieved, plus how to prepare ourselves for the culture shock that all VSO volunteers will inevitably suffer!! Loads of group work exploring our reasons for volunteering and coping strategies. Played some fun games, including the ‘trading game’, where the 20 of us were split into 5 different countries (UK, US, Thailand, Bangladesh and Tanzania – I was in Tanzania), each given different resources and tools (paper, scissors, compass, rulers etc) to make paper shapes to sell to the bank. We’d set up a deal with the US so we could use their tools (compass & scissors) to make the shapes with our resources (paper), though we had to give a ridiculous percentage of our output as payment for use of their tools. In the end we thought we’d done pretty well, especially with how skewed the rules and bank were in favour of UK & US, though admittedly we did use some underhand tactics – stealing another pair of scissors and not declaring much of our actual output – the US team wasn’t watching us closely enough!