The air conditioning is set very high here. I actually wish I had brought a jacket. I tried turning the temperature down in my room just a bit but almost right away the room got so humid that I was literally sliding on the tile floors.
You have to understand the opulence of this place! It shows you how the other half lives. This is the kind of place that has door men to open the door for you when you go in and out of the lobby. They have a thick, fluffy robe for me to wear in the room and fuzzy slippers to take home. When I checked in last night they asked me if I wanted wine or grape juice.
Breakfast is included in the cost of the room for the night. It's an amazing spread. At the bread station they have croissants, muffins, wassabe nuts, cashews, and sesame honey squares./ At the fruit station they have passion fruit (which I now have discovered I have a passion for,) watermelon, compote, pineapple, mango, and assorted cheeses. There's a made to order pancake station with a huge variety of toppings. Then there's a main course section with made to order eggs or omelets and then a bunch of things for the side such as Canadian style bacon, beans, rice, potatoes, oatmeal and on and on.
The training room is enormous with a U-Shaped set-up and three projectors to put the presentation in English, French and Portuguese. The height of the room is two stories but the sound quality is excellent. There are two booths in the back from which the interpreters work. They are just amazing. They translate simultaneously, without pause while the speaker talks into a microphone. The participants can hear the interpretation in real time with barely seconds of delay. Their patience is amazing. Every once in a while they signal to the facilitator to slow down.
The first day and a half I was like a participant. I was in learning mode and just took in all of the information about monitoring and evaluation as I could. I got to learn more about our client -- PMI (The Presidential Malaria Initiative) and the jobs of the Monitoring and Evaluation Managers (M&E managers) and Database Managers (DB Managers.) I understood most of it before, but now I have a sense of the things they do in-between when I work with them. I also focused on learning who was who in the room and tried to get a sense of the challenges in their country.
We had barely gotten started when it was time for coffee break with more food. These scrumptious little bite sized cakes -- not too sweet -- just right. They even had a machine that makes decaffeinated espresso!
They arranged for us to have lunch in the dining room again. Lunch was more of the same type of affair as breakfast. The bread station also had desserts piled high and made to look fancy, the pancakes changed to waffles with ice cream, the fruit station became an appetizers station and the main course just had so many options I didn't know what to do. I discovered too late that there was a special Ghanaian section of the station with specialties of Ghana and today's special was Fufu.
Back to class, more food and then the afternoon session included a section on how to teach. The M&E Managers usually have to train the seasonal staff that they hire to do all sorts of things such as data entry, quality assurance and how to fill out a million forms. The objective of this training was to encourage the participants to use various techniques beyond lecture to get people more involved in the subject. They were encouraged to come up with role-play exercises and hands-on exercises to get people involved. The participants were broken into groups and given the task of creating a training for a particular task. It wasn't really fair, but I was put into a group. We did a hands-on exercise about how to fill out a team leader form. I just happened to have some of the information they would need already on my computer so we agreed to get them to fill out their own team leader form based on that information. We selected Patrick to be the teacher, but, of course, he did things I would not have done -- including starting with a lecture about the purpose of the form, but it was a bit out of my control. He told everyone to fill out the team leader form, but apparently everyone didn't think he literally meant for them to do it because they didn't move at all. Still, the other groups missed the point entirely -- even the ones that were assigned to a role-play exercise didn't get the participants to role-play, they did a role-play themselves -- kind of missing the point. It wasn't long before we were painfully behind schedule.
I slowly started giving out baseball caps to the friends that I had made. They were very well received.
Here's all of the people who were in the training. Jennifer, Keith and I were facilitators. Pamela is also from Bethesda and Ashley was there for her third day at Abt.
Joel and Romaric were there from Benin. Seth, Bryan and, of course my Samuel were there from Ghana. Fernando & Rodriguez were there from Mozambique. Kelvin & Patrick were representing Zambia. Fatimata and Osama were from Senegal. Rwanda representatives were Juste and Benjamin. It was great to meet them, especially Juste; I've been working for years with him. I got to meet Mamadu and Benti from Mali. Mamadu is so new he hasn't even officially started at Abt! Arnaud and Niaina are also long time colleagues from Madagascar and finally I met Solomon and Habtamu from Ethiopia. Solomon is also new and he's going to be terrific.
After class they brought us all back to the dining room (since we weren't already full enough.) It was more incredible food on top of incredible food.
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