A busy week

I’ve now been back home for about a week and a half and it’s been kinda busy.... I spent five days of last week in Birmingham attending a VSO training course. This course rejoices in the title of SKWID (Skills for Working in Development – VSO are better at acronyms than any other organisation I have come across) and represents stage 2 in the training process. Stage 3 is in-country training which is, not surprisingly, delivered on arrival in your placement country (Indonesia in my case).
The SKWID course takes place in VSO’s residential training centre at Harborne Hall in Birmingham and takes the form of four challenging days. The session kicked off with a Health & Security workshop which included a medical briefing on such pleasant matters as malaria, Dengue Fever and Giardia (look it up, I won’t explain it here), as well as advice on personal safety and security, water filtration and food hygiene in tropical countries. The SKWID course itself was attended by 17 volunteers, all of whom are preparing to head off for such far flung parts as Philippines, Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, and a number of African countries. There were two couples on the course, including one of who are bravely bringing their eighteen month daughter with them to Cameroon. While we were there, a number of us were interviewed by the Independent on Sunday about the reasons why we had volunteered the interviews appeared in a big spread with accompanying photo – click HERE to read the article online.

The workshops we attended during the training course focused on topics as diverse as the identification and analysis of stakeholders, work on various forms of participatory approaches, facilitation of meetings and workshops (without using laptops and Powerpoint !) and many other useful subjects. I found it to be a great opportunity to meet other people (including two other Irish volunteers) who are in a similar situation to me and are asking the same sort of questions about their placements that I am.

So, (assuming that my passport arrives back from London in time !) next Sunday will see me dragging myself back to Dublin Airport for the last time in quite a while. I fly via London and Doha and arrive in Denpasar (on the island of Bali) on Monday afternoon local time. Then it will be straight down to language training – we will have classroom sessions from 0800 to 1230 five days a week, plus some additional sessions on cultural training and VSO’s procedures and structures in Indonesia. At the end of the first week, I will be moving in with a family in near Denpasar and will stay with them for the remainder of the training so that should be really interesting.

This week, it's been great to get some emails from other VSO volunteers already in Maumere who have given me some idea of what to expect when I arrive on Flores. I was especially pleased to hear that the hospital has wireless internet access !

Now I'm off to do some more shredding and sorting....