May 1

I realise I’ve been off the blogging radar for a little bit. I’m still working with my organisation, but have now come to full realisation that my placement is not really working. The major epiphany of last week is that my placement objectives are not possible without the involvement of my colleagues. It sounds simple, but admitting that to myself has taken this long. If my colleagues do not actually want to engage with me, anything I may contribute is not sustainable. While I think I have put myself out there to build relationships with my colleagues, I have doubts whether we will ever reach a point where we are actually working together. I’ve even wracked my brain wondering whether I am capable of working with others. As the only non-Zambian member of the organisation, I believe there is an expectation for me to do things – do the trainings, write the manuals, getting proposals funded, organise workshops, etc. However, here’s the catch, building the capacity of the organisation requires not only the involvement, but also the commitment of my colleagues. What good is it for me organising a teacher’s workshop, when I do not have at least one colleague working with me through the entire process. The bigger realisation is that no amount of committed and effort on my part will make my placement work unless the organisation is equally serious about seeing the objectives through.

With all that said, what’s new with me?

-- What is not new is my wardrobe. I am tired of all my clothes. I think I actually have a work clothes rotation so that I don’t even have to think about what I should wear. I need new shoes as well. For the past few months, I’ve been meaning to go to the second hand clothes/shoes market on the weekend. Apparently, with a bit of perseverance, digging through piles of used goods may find you decent new-ish used items. However, when Saturday morning rolls around, the last thing I want to go is get up and jump on a minibus to dig through piles. A lot of used clothing here comes from Canada/US and I have definitely seen little league sport jerseys. I think I passed a guy in a Brampton Cubs t-shirt yesterday… as in Southern Ontario Brampton? The poor guy was probably wonder why I was starting at him.

--It’s getting colder. We have beautiful day time highs of 30C, but it usually drops to 10-15C during the evening. I feel so un-Canadian saying this, but I’ve had to put on long sleeves and my woolly socks in the evening. I’ve also been wearing my fleece vest in the mornings. This morning, I was wishing I had my puffy down vest. When have I ever worn anything fleece or down filled above 0C temperatures? I think describing the Calgary winter chinooks phenomenon – all snow melting in one day and Calgarians bringing out the shorts – would be hard to explain. People are even wearing toques now. Come winter in July/August, I’m wondering whether I’ll see a mittens and snowsuits.

--One of the schools we work with has links with an organisation that gets people in the US to sponsor children. As someone who grew up seeing the Sunday morning commercials for sponsoring children, it was fascinating to hear how sponsorship is presented from the developing world side. The person representing that organisation put it this way, “the whites in America will see how the children are living and will want to help to pay for school and medicine. We put pictures of how the children live on the website so they will want to make the house better too.” For the agencies that arrange sponsorships, it is a numbers game. The school got a request for x number of students to support. Yet, it could not be determined whether the sponsorship would continue up to Grade 12.