The Insight Seminar here in Chimoio is wrapping up, which
gives me an opportunity to reflect on what’s happened, good and bad. This is
the third seminar we have held in Mozambique and the second Portuguese seminar.
It is the first seminar in which I did not act as presenter—instead, Leonard
Chetechsi took on the role of presenter. I acted as assistant and coach during
and after the seminars. My main rule this time was to coach Leonard on seminar
presentation and debrief with him after each session. Leonard is one of our
co-workers in Mozambique and was the interpreter for last year’s Portuguese
seminar. When I leave, he will be responsible for organizing and leading
seminars for the next year.
So how has Leonard been doing? Overall, he’s doing a
fantastic job—he’s a natural presenter, and will be invaluable in helping
Mozambicans understand the new concepts we are introducing. But generalities
are only worth so much, so let’s get into seminar details, what they mean, and
why they’re important. For ease of reading, I will break this down by point of
interest (this will probably take several blog entries to completely cover):
Point One: Schedule
We originally were planning for me to present/oversee four
to five seminars while I was here. Unfortunately, due to limited funds delaying
my departure and car trouble, we ended up with three and a half weeks in
Mozambique instead of our original three month plan. This left us with enough
time for one seminar. In keeping with our theme of “new scheduling plans”, we
decided to implement an experimental seminar schedule—instead of holding the
seminar for five eight-hour days, we thought we would try weeknights and
weekends. This would give participants time to work during the day. This meant
we had to extend the total time of the seminar to two weeks, but we thought it
was a fair trade-off.
The result was mixed. While the participants were certainly
able to get more work done during the week, the cultural attitude toward time
meant that each session started almost an hour late—over ten days, that drops
ten hours. In addition, they participants weren’t really keen on coming over
the weekend, which meant we lost additional time. Between the two, our total
seminar time was cut in half. On the plus side, the participants did have extra
time to think through what they were learning. In addition, the participants
indicated they wanted to complete the seminar as soon as Leonard gets back from
traveling with Al and I back to South Africa. Overall verdict: while the
five-day schedule is inconvenient for people, it seems to provide a more
complete learning experience with the fewest difficulties. Leonard wants to conduct the next seminar
using the standard schedule.
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