Alex Little

It’s now only 4 weeks until I’ll be flying off to Ethiopia – my flight details arrived this week. I also now have only 2 weeks (till end Aug) left working at the OU, I’ve been at the OU for over 7 years and don’t think it’s sunk in yet that I’m actually going , though having the flight details makes everything somewhat more real!

I’ve just come back from my final VSO training course at Harborne Hall, “Training Skills”. Peter, who I met on my first VSO course (“Preparing to Volunteer”), was also on the course and by coincidence, him and his wife are the same Ethiopian town I’m going to (Mekelle/Mek’ele/Mekele/Makelle or various other spellings!) – and I met a couple of the other volunteers who’re going to Ethiopia (there are 24 of us altogether going in Sept).

I found the training skills course to be the least intensive of the 3 VSO courses I’ve been (only one day where the course ran till 8pm), but was fun and I learnt a lot nonetheless – possibly because it was the course I was most prepared for and had a better idea of what to expect. The best aspect for me was getting to practice running training sessions. We had a very short practice session of 10 mins, then a longer one of 25 mins, each time training the other course participants. The others in my group ran courses in… ‘What is communication advocacy’, ‘How does school self-evaluation fit into the school development cycle’, ‘How to measure pulse’, and ‘The ethics of corporate sponsorship’ – so a wide spectrum of topics!

Mine was different again, I did a session on how to create a blog (2 blogs successfully created: here and here). It’s been long time since I’ve had to train a group of people in front of computers so had forgotten about the different speeds at which people work and how difficult it can be keeping them engaged if they’re waiting for me to answer someone else’s query before I get to them (and I only had 4 people to train!).

My remaining worry about my placement at the moment is how I’m going to train people in IT with unreliable power and internet connections, and how I can do IT training without computers – if anyone can point me at some good resources for this then they’d be most gratefully received