Choir video

Choral raves and grand openings

This weekend held two events for the volunteer diaries - on Friday Helen's church choir group held a fundraising night (dubbed by John as a 'choral rave') and Saturday saw the grand opening of Safari Garden, complete with new bantaba. 

Helen's night was in Senegambia at the Kairaba Hotel, so we all met at Aso Rock and had a few drinks before travelling up to the venue. There were quite a few of us as we were joined by the newest batch of volunteers who arrived on 1 November. The hotel was pretty busy when we arrived - we had been told it started at 9pm so we turned up at 10pm right on time for the actual start! There were many many Gambians in their finest outfits, and a few toubabs who had found their way in - possibly holiday makers. 

Helen's choir were all in asobe (matching outfits) - although this asobe was a matching style of dress not matching material, which made for a lovely colourful assembly of singers! 

Helen did a solo and was dragged to the front of the stage to do some very energetic dancing as well! I loved the fact that she was doing her solo in front of a speaker that said champion - she certainly was a champion, singing all the songs in local languages... testament to the many rehearsal hours she has been putting in with the group. 

I took some videos which I will try and upload separately. 

We stayed until about midnight (the first half) and then left to find food and drink before heading home. 

Me with one of the newest vols, Maja

On Saturday we went to Safari Garden. They held an opening party to celebrate the start of the new season, and the unveiling of their new 'bantaba'. A bantaba in The Gambia is a meeting area, often under a tree, where people (traditionally men) sit and discuss / make decisions and drink attaya. In Safari Garden's case this is a large thatched area that they have built as a kind of covered bar area, and it looks really nice. 

They arranged a great buffet and gave out drinks to help celebrate the opening of the new space and set them up for what will hopefully be a good tourist season. My youngest brother and his friend will be staying there in January and I think they will really like it there; it is a great local hotel with lovely staff. 

APR and PMLT training

Last year I was involved in VSO’s process of Annual Partnership Reviews, and led 25 workshops with partners to help the Programme Office to complete the partnership monitoring and learning tool (PMLT) for all 25 partners. The APR and PMLT are relatively new processes for VSO, designed to meet the increasing need for monitoring and evaluation across the international development sector. After receiving all APR results for last year, VSO’s Monitoring and Evaluation team analysed the effectiveness of the approach, and formulated even clearer guidelines and protocols for how to manage the process and assess the impact of our work.

This week the Regional Monitoring and Evaluation Manager for West Africa came and delivered training to Programme Office staff to support the APR process for 2013/14. As I was involved last year I will work with the Programme Office again this year; I am pleased about this as it means that there will be continuity, and I will get to see what partners have achieved since the last review. However, I am somewhat daunted by the level of work as I remember how much energy this process took last year!

The training was really really good. We learned a lot about the revised protocols for counting beneficiary numbers – something that I really needed to hear about as I had been tearing my hair out over it the week before. I mentioned in my last post that donors often want to hear about reach, but this doesn’t explain impact (you could work with ten people and make lasting change or work with 1000 people and not achieve much at all – but on face value 1000 people sounds better than 10). VSO have really tightened up the way we record these figures – taking a much more conservative approach, and making sure that we only count the people that we really have made a difference to. While this may mean a drop in our figures in the short term, it means that we will have a much better understanding of our impact, and what we are doing to improve the lives of poor and marginalised people.

The training gave us all a lot more confidence, and as we start the process next week I know that we will all go into it with a much clearer understanding. It reminded me of the power of training – even training in something that you have had experience in can really renew your interest and enthusiasm, and help you learn new or consolidate your old skills. Sometimes we worry that we are teaching people how to suck eggs, for example with the livelihoods project we are training farmers who have farmed all their lives. But we can always learn something new, and even if we don’t – good training is often one of the best ways to reinvigorate people and focus effort. 

Sector workshop

Last week the VSO programme office held a sector workshop for partners and volunteers. The idea was for everyone to come together and see how their work fits into the country strategic plan, look at what progress has been made so far, and think about what more needs to be done. 

Abdoulie and I waiting in the wings before my presentation

The office asked me to do a presentation on monitoring and evaluation, so after hearing about the country strategic plan from Samba, and an overview on what volunteers have been working on from Abdoulie, it was my turn to speak. 

I gave a bit of background about why we need monitoring and evaluation, particularly in context of the current international development climate, and what tools and processes we have in place for M&E at VSO. I focused on the annual partnership reviews (key monitoring and evaluation activity for VSO) because the process for 2013/14 is about to start again, and I highlighted the need for accurate volunteer reporting and data collection. Since I have been in place I have worked with the VSO office to develop new reporting templates for the volunteers to capture all the data that we need - particularly in relation to the APRs. As each new group of volunteers have come into the country I have shared the new templates with them and explained the need for them to feed their information to the office - and although I know that they try and explain it to partners where they can, it felt like a good opportunity to show our partners what we ask for and why. 

Next I ran through some of our results. Doing this just ahead of the APR process was difficult, so I just gave an overview of how many people our country strategic plan aimed to reach, and how many people we think we have reached and worked with so far. It's tricky because reach is so often required by donors, but reach doesn't necessarily equal impact, so hopefully after the next round of partnership reviews we will have some more detailed information about what kind of outputs and results we are witnessing.

It was an interesting day - and although much more needs to be done to share information between partners and volunteers working across placements in the same programme / sector areas, the meeting hopefully represented the beginning of a more integrated process. 

Group discussion

After the workshop a few of us went for a glass of wine or two. It was nice to relax after a busy week of preparation.

Helen and Nic happy with wine

Janneke and I - also happy with wine!

L-R- Janneke, Munya, Jaap, John, Helen and Nicola

Martin and a funny looking Munya!

Feet up relaxing! 

Rice salad with alfalfa sprouts and fenugreek sprouts

Last post on food and sprouts for a while I promise - but a quick pic of my latest attempt at getting salad / vegetables / vitamins / balance into my Gambian diet. 

This was rice salad with tomatoes, cucumber, onion, orange segments, alfalfa and fenugreek sprouts, with a lime, orange, salt and pepper dressing, topped with boiled eggs. 

My venture into the world of sprouting has been very successful! 

Beansprouts

Yesterday I went to the market feeling very uninspired and undecided about what to eat for dinner. One vendor said to me "the market is dry today", and it certainly was. My kiliyaan (regular trader) had the usual fare of tomatoes, aubergine, onions and grapefruit and the ladies inside the market just had piles of smoked fish and bitter tomato. So, feeling unsatisfied I settled for the usual half kilo of tomatoes, half kilo of onions, an aubergine... and was gifted a grapefruit. I trudged home (hungry) and pondered whether to add spaghetti or rice to the usual tomato and aubergine concoction.

Imagine my delight when I got home to realise that the beansprouts that I had started off on Saturday evening were ready to eat - in fact more than ready!

Soaked Saturday afternoon and left overnight -
these were the beansprouts on Sunday morning

The beansprouts by Tuesday evening

I think they had sprouted a bit too much really - they had roots forming and big leaves - but they worked out better than I thought they would... 

...and if I nipped the ends off they looked pretty authentic!

I found that I didn't really mind the root and the leaf so I kept them on for extra nutrition. 

I realised that I had some tinned coconut milk, thai green curry paste, aubergine, onion, dried mushrooms and fresh beansprouts - so I made a Thai green curry with rice and was very happy not to eat spaghetti with aubergine and tomato sauce as usual! 

Looks a bit grey due to aubergine and mushroom,
but it was definitely delicious! 

Tobaski year 2

This tobaski was very different to last year. Instead of putting on Gambian style clothes and celebrating at my language teacher's compound, I went to a fellow volunteer's house and had an alternative tobaski featuring pork and alcohol! 

Tobaski fell on Tuesday, and we had Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday as public holidays. On Monday morning I was told I would only be working a half day, so I left work at 1pm and headed off to meet a friend who sells pork (putting in an order of 2kg) before going to the market to buy salad. On Tuesday I met Nicola and we picked up the pork and a couple of Julbrew, and then made our way to Kotu to Dr Joe's house. Once we saw the amount of food Joe had prepared (chicken and lamb marinaded in yoghurt and spices, dhal, salad, flat breads etc), and the salads and prawns that Jaap and Janneke had brought along we realised that we would have plenty of food to go around! We were all very excited to see such colour and variety! Never has beetroot felt like such a novelty! 

Before eating we relaxed and watched Joe's chickens, cat and the birds all enjoying the garden. After the food we all fell into a bit of a meat coma for a while - but soon perked up again when Helen arrived with some wine! Unfortunately the heat and walking around in the mid day sun got the better of me a little bit, and I ended up crashing early with a bad headache. But it was a lovely relaxed day with friends, and a great way to eat some meat and good food! 

Dr Joe's garden / small farm!

Joe - grill master

The chickens joined in the party