New Year, new work

Or I should say a continuation of the work that I began at the end of last year – but with new partners. The Annual Partnership Review visits have started up again, and so far this year I have run two sessions.

On Tuesday I did a session at GADHOH – the Gambian Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. The volunteer who works there seems to have done some great work, and is going on to become an Executive Director at the Gambian Federation of the Disabled now that his placement has come to an end, which is a great career step for him post volunteering.

All fifteen participants at the session were deaf or hard of hearing, and so I facilitated the session through two sign language interpreters – which was a new experience for me but went really well. Everyone had a lot to say for themselves, and it was really interesting to hear about what they have been doing over the last 12 months.

And then today I did a session at the National Training Authority. The volunteer’s placement was IT related, but the discussions about website design, education standards, regulation and enforcement, and Higher Education Institutions transported me back to my old life, and I really enjoyed the workshop.

In between conducting APRs, preparing for APRs, and writing up APRs, I have also been writing case studies for the VSO office, and proof reading / editing those that my colleagues are writing, as part of a quarterly report back to head office. I also need to arrange a quarterly meeting for those working on the World Bank project that I am providing Monitoring and Evaluation support for, and actually do some of my official M&E work! And finally, a new cohort of volunteers come in February, and I hope to do an M&E session as part of their in-country training. Strange to think that there will be new people here soon, and we will no longer be the newbies!  

So I have a tight schedule for the rest of the month, with an APR workshop nearly every day throughout the rest of January – including another trip up country for a few days – and I can see that I will be working hard over the next few weeks. But I am not complaining… I’m happy to busy and feeling useful, and of course I can always find time for beach trips!