Wednesday 28/04
Best day so far... Tuesday was a day for the academics among us but Wednesday morning was for the fun lovers! In a word, DAYCARE... Wednesday morning marked the arrival of some of the craziest kids we had ever seen! It was a chance to allow the parents to have some time of their own, and for us to take some of the pressure off owning a 4yr old! We had a mixture of personalities and ages but unfortunately all of them were HIV positive. On the plus side, you never could have guessed it, all of them were healthy, intelligent, and had unanswerable levels of energy. As soon as there was a sight of a football, that was it, game on.
When the madness had eased for lunch, we thought it was a good time to unleash some sugar on them for the parents to enjoy on the way home. Large bags of sweets were soon clambered over and very quickly 'shared' out amongst the fastest and the strongest... Home time!
The afternoon was a chance for Rachel to unleash some of her expertise and for myself and Alex to see how Marketing is done, Barclays style. Rachel had the uphill task of educating the beaders in Marketing through the medium of a translator; not an easy task one may think?? You haven't met Rachel.... The session was excellent and once again received very good feedback.
With our day at the centre complete, we met at a local bar with a few of the staff. This was a great chance to chat about anything but work and enjoy the last of the sunlight. To top off a great day, we ate at a recommended Italian, we were not disappointed, roll on Thursday!
By Brad Clarke
Thursday 29/04
Today was our last chance to pass some of our skills on to the staff, community volunteers and client entrepreneurs at KHC. Rachel and Alex kicked off with a Successful Business Management session with the Head of Community at KHC and some clients who have recently started a business with KHC's help. The objective was to develop an agreed template for a business proposal and encourage local entrepreneurs to consider their business idea in detail (objectives, resources required, budget and targets) - and happily we were able to agree on a new template for KHC to embed for future use. Again, this was a session that had to be translated but everybody got really involved and had lots to add.
In the afternoon Rachel had been asked to train the KHC leadership team in some conflict management strategies. This was going to be a challenge, as when asked previously the KHC team had denied any conflict in their office! What a surprise then, when the conflict management session turned in to a Pandora's Box! The group had lots of questions and challenges for the various approaches, and we were able to really get them to think about how they deal with conflict on a daily basis.
By Rachel Eyre
Friday 30/04
The last day of the project! The volunteers have delivered a huge amount in a very short space of time and have managed to build excellent rapport with the staff and clients at KHC. They handed over copies of the content of each of their workshops along with handouts for the participants. In a meeting with Dr. Sam (the Director of KHC) and Chris (Operations Director) the volunteers talked about how the content of each of their workshops can be embedded among the staff to ensure that it has a lasting impact at KHC. Each member of staff's personal objectives that they wrote after the workshops were also shared with Chris and Dr. Sam so that they can form part of the appraisal process at KHC. As Chris put it, the volunteers have planted a seed and now KHC can't wait to watch it grow and see what blooms!
After lunch there was a closing ceremony with all the staff, which gave the volunteers chance to say thank you. There were some touching speeches from a number of staff members too and then all the staff sang a song to wish the volunteers a safe journey home. It was a lovely end to an extremely successful project!
By Amy Daw - Project Leader
