Grand Finale Part 2 - Wrapping Up

As I have alluded to in some of my past posts, my time in Zambia was coming to a close this spring. This was my choice, because I missed home. In particular I missed being closer to family and friends, and I missed some cultural aspects of life in Seattle. These included my community living situation, liberal religious and social culture, and more entertainment options that didn’t involve alcohol.

All of this being said, though, transitions are never very easy for me (I am now mourning being away from my friends in Lusaka!), and I was particularly worried about what I would be leaving behind in Zambia. What about all of the projects that were still a “work in progress”? Or even worse, projects that were still just ideas? And what about the cultural values that I was trying to instill in the computer lab managers: greater accountability for how they spent their time, greater priority given to the needs of the students and a culture of encouragement for all learners?

Luckily, as I had mentioned in a previous post, we had been able to hire a local person to continue the work I have been doing. I worked alongside “The New Guy” for several months, and was glad to find that he has a very good understanding of both the value of and the challenges with the work we were doing. He has also was a good cultural guide for me, and I was able to learn some lessons from watching when he was flexible with delays and when he was just as impatient as I was! The New Guy also has previous experience with an NGO and thus is better skilled than I am at financial accounting, which has been very useful as our organization gradually shifts from being “a rich man’s hobby” to becoming an organization that is transparent and accountable enough to attract funding from other sources. The New Guy also has been full of good ideas. The only problem with this is that it meant that our to-do list kept getting longer instead of shorter as I tried to wrap things up! We had to revise our to-do list several times, in a triage sort of process as we saw time rapidly disappearing.

One of the tasks from our to-do list that we were able to complete was a set of inspiring competitions. The first was a teachers’ academic use of IT competition, in which one teacher from each of the four sister schools was asked to prepare a 30 minute lesson in the academic subject of their choice, using PowerPoint as a useful visual aid. They also were asked to prepare an IT based follow-up activity, such as an opportunity for pupils to visit an interactive website and then answer questions based on what they learned. The four participants presented their lessons and follow-up activities to a panel of judges that included head teachers, department chairs, and representatives from our internet provider and the Seattle sister school. All of the judges were impressed by the effort that went into the presentations and the school heads said they were inspired to host similar competitions again and get more teachers to use the laptops and projectors in their classrooms! The second competition was a chance for pupils to learn about web page design and take a stab at designing a home page for our organization. The New Guy setup an online quiz and used the results to select 10 students to compete. He then taught these 10 students the basics of building a web page, and set them loose to see what they could do. While not yet professional quality, the outputs by these students were impressive and creative! The winner of the student competition won a small scholarship towards educational fees, and the winner of the teacher competition won a decent used desktop computer. The pictures shown here are from the judging of the teacher competition and the prize ceremony for both competitions.

The wrap-up tasks from our to-do list included completing the hand-over of the teacher IT training program to the two teachers who had been asked to take over the leadership. This process continued to go well, with neither The New Guy nor I doing too much to organize the August teacher training! The only remaining areas of significant involvement in this program are giving advice on the curriculum and providing banking services for the financially self sufficient course. Another wrap-up task was to make sure that the head teachers and computer committees at each school were up to date on where they stood with their grant cycles, and were prepared to work on this with The New Guy in the future. The New Guy had been attending all of the meetings I had had with school officials for the last few months, but we agreed that it would also be important to have formal hand-over meetings at which all ongoing issues and projects were at least acknowledged. These meetings were scheduled and occurred… two of them not until my last day in Lusaka. Those busy head teachers can be hard to track down!