With a change of location from the UN HQ Africa yo the Hill Park Hotel (scene of the famous broken foot incident in July) all participants set about engaging in day 2 of this participatory learning workshop (PLW).

For reasons that are still not clear we were located a room that was far too small and then transferred to a larger one (the one we booked) and then waited and waited whilst the hotel staff (friendly enough) attempted to find screen, projector & speaker (again all part of the booking) 😉 When all was finally in place the hotel’s network staff decided to take the server offline for security maintenance work, just as we were about to show a video Chaz had produced earlier. All of this meant a delay to and a change in the planned schedule but everyone took it in good heart and got down to work.

One group had started really early meeting partners in town at the university to shoot interviews, vox pops & B roll on entrepreneurship…..and they arrived back before the deadline I’d set, which impressed me greatly. Their editing seemed to run smoothly apart from the ……ooooops I kicked the cable which unplugged the laptop used for editing and almost lost the entire project late in the day…..eh Sonja? 😉

The other group’s working on cultural diversity issues has been evolving in a very interesting way and I am fascinated to see how this project turns out……the focus on inter-tribal marriages and the challenges is presents is fascinating and this was an unexpected pathway through the orignal subject area given.

Four of the new participants were placed in the audacity group and they started work on podcasting. Neither Emily or Angela had used Audacity before and have worked really hard to teach themselves both before and during the trip. They also faced the challenges of working with a group of people with strong and at times conflicting views. I was impressed with the manneer they stuck to what was a challenging task and in just one day have a really interesting round table style podcast in production. I spoke to the group before they left last night and they are looking forward to the critical editing session first thing this morning.

 Fred from SEMA Film Festival came in to discuss our Stories from the Cities collaboration (more later on the blog). We discussed a few plans and he asked to take photos and capture the training processes on video for us. Lucy and Jen then worked on the ideas he had come up with preparing next weeks exhibition. The picture for this blog is one of Fred’s and captures the mind-mapping and segmenting discussions of the podcast workshop.

Very pleased with how everything is going and especially with the students who are very…..errrr……lively ;-). The are working very hard and I am very pleased with their engagement. It is also pleasing to see just how well they are getting on with our partners. Very pleasing indeed.

Today I was introduced to Fred after liaising with him over Facebook for the past few months regarding the Stories from our Cities project. We sat down and discussed everything that needed to be completed for the opening of the exhibition on the 20th. To begin with I was a bit overwhelmed with the amount of work that needed to be done as I didn’t realise the scale of the exhibition – he has arranged guest speakers,  performers and the work is being displayed to a professional standard. I clarified the different aspects he wanted me to do and ensured I had a clear picture of his vision of the exhibition in order to meet his expectations and have the work prepared before we leave for Rongo. He was really thorough which helped me engage with his vision and the work he has been doing in Nairobi. I admired how enthusiastic and driven he was and this encouraged me to crack on as I didn’t want to let him down.

In order to get the work down, I had to leave my video group which was unfortunate as our group were on a roll and the students were really progressing today. However,  I sat and did the work in the same room as the group so I could keep checking in with what they were doing and didn’t slip out the loop.

I explained to Jen what was required and we managed to get it all done this afternoon (including getting info from people back home) which was a success! I would have liked some more time to work on the project (get more images, stories, video clips) and more time working alongside Fred but that wasn’t possible due to the busy nature of this trip. Nevertheless, me and Jen made the most of the material we had. This did mean leaving out a few aspects of Brighton which we didn’t have material to reflect it such as the lanes.

Ultimately, I am really really pleased that the exhibition is going ahead as it was off the cards for a while… it is the part of the trip I have worked on/looked forward to most so I can’t wait to see it all come together on the 20th. A good end to the trip 🙂

The next step is planning how I am going to do the speech at the opening because I am real bad at public speaking and I’m REALLY nervous already… luckily Jen and Sarah said they would do it too and I’ll have to get some lessons off the master of delivering speeches (Sonja)

I will blog about the video workshop tomorrow once we have completed it 🙂

Today has been long but fab! Yesterday felt a little rushed and off the cuff in comparison. Today we got into the swing of things with an early start at the University of Nairobi. After successfully meeting with our interviewee and vox poppers who stuck to UK time rather than Africa (thankfully). We had an exciting trip to the hotel including a walking tour from three of our new Kenyan friends. We walked through uptown Nairobi and had, I’m told a very tame, ride on a matatus.

Suji was unfortunately late to the filming at the university and the others in the group had been somewhat hogging the equipment. Therefore when we arrived at the hotel I suggested I took Suji out to use the cameras. With the help of Maddy we got some useful B-roll footage before starting editing.

The editing process was surprising although Dekker had mentioned he had done some editing, he shocked us all (in the best way) by having made a behind the scenes film with the footage from yesterday at the UN building. As a result of this we decided it would be best to allow him to use the software he was familiar with (Las Vegas Pro) to edit. This worked as an exchange of skills as we were unfamiliar with this program, so he showed us some tricks and we were able to make suggestions on how to improve. The other members of the group were taking notes from Dekker, therefore this was the perfect example of our ‘training the trainer’ approach.

Today I was up and out of the hostel by 7:30am ready for the spacious ride to Nairobi uni to continue filming the for the video. It was a lovely uni, it had an air of sophistication about it, students here stroll in in smart shirts and trousers whereas we rock up in hoodies and tracksuits!

After vox-popping, b-role shooting and the interview, we were taken on a walking tour from uptown Nairobi through the downtown to catch a matatus (local transport). That was after the dodging of traffic on a road I can only describe as a dual carriageway, there is no green man in Kenya!

It was the Audio workshops big day and honestly it was a big challenge! From equipment mal-functions to overwhelming ideas it was hard to focus a theme for the podcast. Mind-mapping turned into mind-boggling , we looked at everything from tribalism to politics. Eventually we stuck with politics and it’s effect on youth unemployment as it was a subject that the participants felt strongly about. Introducing them to a conversational style of recording was challenging as it’s seems unnatural of you are ring recording. James, Kevin, Moses and Gideon found they would work tether by doing one continuous recording other than segments… So we ran with it. It actually worked to my surprise. Hopefully engagement levels will be higher tomorrow as we will be going through the audio- the participants have the chance to be critical and create there podcasting vision.

Second day of training and This morning took off with incredible pace! We were up and ready for 7:30 am! Missing out on breakfast was hard but it was worth it in the end for the experience. We got to travel to Niarobi university and conduct our vox pops and interview with a young entrepreneur. I was extremely impressed with the way everyone worked on shoot and how organised they were. One of the members did not turn up till later and she didn’t have much of the experience filming with the camera, so to give her some more adequate time with the camera we sent her outside when we got to the hotel to do pretend interviews with me jen and rod. From the trip we ended up with some great footage and the best part was being able to ride on the matatus bus, very interesting selection of music to say the least! But an authentic Kenyan experience. When we arrived at the hotel we begun to put all the footage together and edit the film. We had some difficulties with sound which we partially fixed and i feel like even though the editor knew a lot, he and the rest of the group have taken away a lot more knowledge regarding editing structure and continuity. Overall i had a really fun day and we made stronger relationships with our group.

After a delayed start – surprisingly not due to the students oversleeping but breakfast being late – we dashed to the UN HQ Africa with it’s very strict security to discover 2 things. Firstly, I had been so busy making sure our partners and students had everything with them and then rushing to get everyone on the bus and out of the campsite that I left a bag of equipment on my bed…..this resulted in me being subjected to many stern looks and good hearted jibes……whoops! Luckily we were able to manage throgh the day with the 4 cameras we had….so all was well….phew!

The second discovery was the announcement that several people who had been attending would be there until the second day due to work committments…..this meant that we had to totally rejig the planned schedule but I had pre-warned the students about the need to think on their feet and adapt and they took it all in their collective stride.

I wont outline the day’s events here because the students are blogging with their own spins and intepretations and I would urge everyone to read and comment on their blogs. I can say that this was quite an intimidating event because in was a) at the UN HQ Africa and, b) everyone was in suits and looked very professional and businesslike. Also they were a little hesitant in engaging, this is more due to the formality of Kenya culture on such occassions than anything the students did or didn’t do. I was impressed with the manner in which they engaged the participants and broke down the barriers of formailty. By the end of the very tiring day all participants were laughing and joking but fully engaged and even coming up with ideas for scenes in the video they are shooting….more on this later.

As I type this we are about to leave for our second day of the workshop. We will post more later but I am eager to see how the students deal with the different challenges that today will bring them….especially as new participants are due to join us and video projects are already in production.

More form me later.

As Peter had said, we will have a lot of challenges that we have to be prepared for and it is our job to make sure we can think on our feet and run with it. The first major challenge that we had to address was that not everyone on the workshop had turned up on the first day. More people will be joining us tomorrow that we will have to figure out a plan for. So our whole day of planning on Thursday needed to be adjusted.

We started the work shop by splitting into groups. (Luckily we have a lot of very skilled video people that can guide us) so we assessed our skills and made two groups of five. We had 5 people in the groups assigned to us which we would then be working on to create a 2-3 minute video to raise awareness of the inter faith issues that they felt passionately about. After a brief introduction from us we started mind mapping things in their lives that meant most to them.

– Culture
– Environmental Issues
– Marriage (Divorce)
– Peace

After talking through what all of these issues meant to them we dribbled across a common ground.
CULTURE

They explained to us how proud they were that they were Kenyans, and how many tribes there were that were mixing successfully in community. This seemed like a topic they really wanted to explore and encourage. So we altered our main topic to INTERCULTURAL and then set out addressing the negatives and positive of intercultural diversity. We all decided on the subject of how marriage has become an primary way of allowing the different tribes to engage with each other, and learn from each other. How it was becoming popular in keeping their rich culture alive whilst also progressing and changing. (This sounded like something I really wanted to understand more about. With the title of ‘Peace, Marriage and Cultural Diversity’ we set about constructing questions that they wanted to address. We showed our team how to story board their ideas and plan out how they were going to film this documentary and to my surprise everyone was very engaging and enthusiastic. (This was a relief as it seemed to be a bit of a struggle to get them motivated at the start). After a brief introduction to story boarding we showed them the equipment they were going to be using and taught them a few useful tips whilst videoing documentaries. We then explained the key roles, eg producer, director, camera man etc and let them choose what they would like to be. It was so nice to see them engage and get excited about their roles and really get into character. We then had a mock interview with Taylor and I as the interviewees, (this was fun as we had no idea about intercultural marriages in Kenya. They laughed at some of our silly answers. We then talked through b roll ideas and started filming our very first scene. In this scene their would be two hands with weddings rings on them, the idea was that they were symbolising how two different cultures can be brought together in unity. So I volunteered my hand for the job ( it was nice to be married if only for a few minutes.)

After that we filmed a few more b roll shots and discussed what we were planning to do with the interviews tomorrow.

By the end of the day we were all shattered from a pretty hands on first day but it was very rewarding to say the least. I think our team bonded well and I look forward to continuing to work with them again tomorrow.

Our last thing for the day was to visit the Maasai markets which were so very busy and so overwhelming after the day we had, I didn’t end up buying anything which is probably for the best.

So the first real day of training was really intense. We woke up and everyone was very tired from the night before as we were having our breakfast but then we say a group of baby monkeys in the trees around us so we all cheered up. We drove for about an hour through into Nairobi City and into the United Nations building. This place was probably one of the coolest buildings I have visited with all the flags lined up and big bushes cut out in the shape of giraffes.
As we entered the conference we were welcomed by Willis (Director of International Youth Kenya) with an introduction speech about what opportunities programmes likes these can bring to people in Kenya. Then we had a speech from Kelvin Keya (Partnerships Communications Specialist UN Volunteers) about what exactly his organisations was doing for the people of Kenya. He thanked us all greatly for coming and for participating in helping the community and talked about how we can help create opportunities for people by teaching basic video, audio and photography skills. We were then introduced to the director if the entire programme Dimitri who also thank us for coming, and spoke about the meaning of information – “if you can manage information you can manage the world”. I particularly like this quote from him because it relates well to what we have been learning in Media Studies at University. Broken down, it relates to how new opportunities that are arising due to social networking and better technology; and how this helps to contribute to how information can be more accessible and easier spread. The final introductions came from a man called David who was relating a message from the Chairman if the Youth Employment Fund. (Their goal is to promote youth employment and enterprenurialship). In his speech he quoted Winston Churchill, “History will be kind if you write it” – this was very interesting and I think it really resonates here, it is an understanding that we can change our future and the future of others for the better by participating in programmes like these.
We then had a brief speech from Peter Day who addressed what we are here to achieve and also outlines that we are not online engaging in this programme just for the students, we are also engaging and learning ourselves. This is called community based learning, this goes beyond just volunteering, it also helps us change and grow. Just from other people in my group I have learnt a great amount about video editing and filming already in order to teach others these skills.
We then had a fantastic speech from Sonja who got up and introduced who we were, what we did and what we were looking to get out of the next couple of weeks.
And that was only the first hour of the day… The actually community based learning came after the tea break…

Initially today was pretty daunting having to quickly adapt to the challenge of few participants attending. However this is perhaps to be expected with this type of community engagement as a factor of ‘real life’ (and with the issue of Kenyan time being something quite different to UK time). We were able to continue with most of our plan for the day which was reassuring as having a plan or outline kept us focused on what we were hoping to achieve by the end of the session.

Having worked through a mind map, we changed our schedule moving the equipment introduction before story boarding. I think my group would agree that we did this because we felt that the group were itching to get started. By addressing their need to get up and get to grips with the equipment this gave me the opportunity to draw up an outline for a storyboard so that we wouldn’t be waiting around. Although I have little video skills I felt I was able to contribute to the story boarding and ideas discussion confidently.