On the Move

Arriving in Accra in a few hours. It's been s long flight, but I'm feeling alright all things considered. A portion of us headed into Amsterdam for a few hours during our layover and didn't regret it. The Dutch transportation system is pretty awesome. We took a train from the airport to the city centre, which was about 20 minutes. The streets were quiet when we first arrived fairly early in the morning, but started to pick up as we were leaving. Bicycles seem to dominated the streets and the whole system manages to maintain a chaotic balance between bikes, pedestrians, cars and trains. Perhaps everyone just has a little more patience, but either way it as a very warm place.


Myself and some of the other JFs during out stopover in Amsterdam.

Thinking back to the last week, pre-departure training was a pretty intense experience. Sessions started at 9am every morning and ended anywhere from 6pm to 10pm. Topics included the structure of development (donors, NGOs and individuals), safety, security and health, cultural integration and methods of participatory fieldwork. We struggled through the challenges of real life development project case studies and tried to learn as much as possible about our particular projects. Just about every session involved some sort of group participation and as the week progressed we found ourselves doing more and more “real” activities such as making presentations, role playing and conducting interviews.

But the biggest lessons of the week didn't come in the form of specific skills or knowledge. The most important thing I got out of the week was and understanding of just how hard what we're about to do is. It's not that I didn't know this before, but knowing and understanding are two very different things. And no amount of development knowledge, facilitation techniques or frameworks can change the fact that this is going to be hard. The skills and knowledge we picked up this week are good starting tools, but really in the grand scheme of things they're drops in a bucket. They aren't puzzle pieces we can fit together to find answers, there aren't even answers to find. All there really is is learning. I think I'm about to do a lot of learning...

Andrea just told me to look out the window of the plane and down at the Sahara desert. It certainly looks like a desert, there isn't really a better way to put it. Starting to get really nervous now. I guess I know I can do this, I'm just not sure how. Here's hoping for the best. Besides, it's a little late to turn back now.