Today was our first day participating in and facilitating workshops for youth development.Waking up to an early start was a challenge. But there were many more challenges we faced throughout the day which we had to overcome. The aim of the workshops was to encourage volunteers to engage in skill training focussed on enhancing their own personal development and how to then use those skills for addressing community needs. After the introductory speeches from the Kenyan youth representatives we integrated ourselves amongst the volunteers. Firstly we had to think on our feet (as Peter warned we may have to do) there ended up being a lot less volunteers than we expected and many of us! We dealt with this by sorting ourselves into groups of mixed skills and dividing participants in to two groups. During the workshop i initially felt quite confident about teaching video as i have a good knowledge and understanding of it. To start we stuck to our plan for planning and development their ideas but we found it didn’t work as well as expected and we struggled to get an idea. I was a little thrown back because i felt i couldn’t help with the idea generating as much as i would have liked, my knowledge around entrepreneurship was not too strong. However when we got to the practical teaching they seemed to cooperate really well and engage with the equiptment. There were some language barriers but it was easier as the day went on! I found they were really eager to better their education and appreciative of our time. Whilst i felt they already had video skills they seemed to learn more technical terms and skills. We conducted test interviews and planned our storyboard. They also had a play with going and filming some b roll with the framing skills they learnt. As the day finished we concluded that we would travel to Nairobi university to do a vox pop and interview within the university.
Today was certainly a challenge i didn’t know what to expect and we were all a bit out of our comfort zones. Although i think we will be able to run smoother workshops from now on and in Rongo as we have had the experience.