If there's something in life worth doing, it's worth over doing.

Workshops in Tanzania

4 hours of sleep on Sunday, two nights, 3 days later with a 17 hours trip in Cairo washing my pant leg clean from horse dung, I found myself in a car screeching to a halt in the gridlock that was Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania having not slept since that Sunday. Another two days I get the full report of what I was doing.

In short, I am "to help the students find problems in the community and fix them" Said Stella, the regional director for YCI, the NGO I'm working with.

Or more indepth, I am to support Emerging Leaders (project) to link the problems identified during community mapping visits into project identification techniques and support Emerging Leaders to organize their ideas of  the problems identified in designing a project, and  discuss with them tips on project implementation, monitoring and evaluation. In more academia terms, increase the capacity of the community by strengthening their self-efficacy.


I gave a blank stare to Stella.

The youth have already gone through several months of skills development including leadership skills, community mapping, and other skills development, with other volunteers previous. Then I come in to finish up the curriculum by having them finally carry out their task by approaching community leaders, partnerships, other NGO's and community members. This is daunting.

"So, this sounds like something I should be already an expert in!" I cried. My heart sunk as I have no training in this field!

As I start to learn more about what needs to be done and what the youth need to develop, the more my confidence began to grow. There are things I haven't done before, like train a group of youth to ask for funding. I haven't even done that! My fundraiser isn't going so well, I think I have a lot to learn from them about that!

But then there are things I've done, such as giving classes. English classes. But this time the theme is proposal writing for funding and grants. Computer classes on how to turn on the machine and turn on a word processor. Life skills that we otherwise overlook in our daily lives.

All these projects are recommended by the UN Millennium Development Goals, given to Canadian Development Agency to different NGO's to achieve goals by 2015.

Well, sink or swim time! Roll up my sleeves and dive in. This will be the funnest project I have given myself since scaling a mountain in Nepal. This is what I set out to do, it's time to do it.

One of my more favourite quotes that I've been reciting these days:
"If there's something in life worth doing, it's worth over doing"