Friday, June 22, 2007

June 21 – Going ‘Up-Country’

I suppose I have to explain the term ‘up-country’. Around Freetown when folks talk about going out to the communities around the capital they call it going ‘up-country’. Technically it’s sort of ‘in-country’ or ‘side-country’ but you get the point.

Wednesday was a big day for our team as we got to go ‘up’ to Porto Lorko (pronounced without the ‘r’). It was about a 1.5 hour drive from the office on some rough roads and the 7 of us fit nice and tightly into the Plan vehicle and arrived safe and sound.
Our mission, to train the volunteers in the community who take photos of the sponsored children, their families, and the area to use digital cameras. This feeds into the new software tool we just released that will resize and digitally label the photos to feed into the Sponsorship packages. This is all part of an Implementation Dress Rehearsal (IDR) for the tool where groups in sponsorship countries all over the world try out the tool, the new processes and the training and give us feedback so that we can improve it before it gets distributed globally. Since three of us are here in Freetown, Sierra Leone was chosen as an IDR site and we were asked to do the training.

We spent the afternoon and evening with a class of about 30 volunteers teaching them about operating digital cameras and the dos and don’ts of photography for Plan. It was fun to watch the audience try to understand Conor’s Irish accent and then listen to Nana translate it into Krio. The class started out quite timid but in the end and after a few interactive activities they were more than enthusiastic. Nana told us that it is a badge of honor to volunteer for Plan and that these people are honest and trustworthy. They were pretty smart too and are now excellent digital photographers.

One of the things I found very amusing is that some of these folks arrived on Raleigh bikes that had been donated to Plan. The amusing part was that some of the bikes were still wrapped in bubble wrap! A funny sight as they rode off into the darkness when we were finished.
Our ride home was a lot less cramped and filled (as usual) with tall tales from Nana. Then another night of storm-filled sleeping!
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