Hong Kong Report

I've been back from Hong Kong for about a week, and I am still a bit jet lagged. The trip back was a fairly uneventful 32 hours, but I fear I have not entirely recovered. My time in Hong Kong was, however, very enjoyable and fruitful. I was able to work with Al and Kitty on a variety of training projects. Al and I also got a chance to review some of our respective observations and theories as well as set up some long term plans for IRI.

As always, the people we are working with were great. Linda, our host, was a great sport about having more guests than beds (I slept on a couch while I was there). She also worked with Al on training programs at church, eventually taking over the training herself. Kitty, our HK board member, also worked with Al and me on church training programs. I think that Linda and Kitty are an excellent start on developing new trainers in Hong Kong, but we will certainly be looking for more as we go along. I was also able to work with Kitty on a number of teacher training programs for some of the local schools. Like last year, we primarily focused on SEN (special educational needs) schools, whose teachers face particular challenges which require creative and adaptable thinking. In addition, Kitty arranged for me to be a keynote speaker at an educational conference. The audience was primarily senior teachers and principals, although we had some education students and a few parents, as well. The presentation was on building relationships in educational environments, and (from what I could tell) was well received. It was a great opportunity, and I'm glad I was able to present to such a great audience.

I'm grateful for the opportunity to work in Hong Kong. It is a great place, and I love working with everyone there. Currently, our plans are to return next year - Al will be back for a short time in the Spring, and I should be back for another round of teacher training in the fall. We hope to increase our presence in educational and professional development, and to that end, I have begun looking into PhD programs to provide additional credentials for our program, and to advance my own knowledge and formal academic research on our theories and strategies for human development. I'll keep everyone posted as that plan develops.

Speaking of theories, I should finally be back to ABC thinking next week with...the ABC cognitive style.

Busy Week, Not Much Posting

My time in Hong Kong has been very interesting and exciting. I have been working on teacher training, youth programs, and long-term plans for IRI. Unfortunately, this doesn't leave me with as much time to put together more on the ABC concepts. Sorry for the delays. I will be in Hong Kong for one more week, which will continue my busy schedule. I plan to be back on track to continue the overview of the theories behind our work once I get back to the U.S.

I have had a chance to talk with some of our overseas team members at length while here, and have learned more about how some of our ideas have been impacting the people we are working with. I want to include an analysis of some of that information in later posts, but the short version is that things are going very well in terms of our human development programs. The long version will have to wait for a more in-depth blog (or two). In the meantime, I will post a summary of the Hong Kong trip once I get back to the States (or next week, if I can carve out the time).

Doing Much but Saying Little

I’ve been a bit quieter than I expected lately, on account of keeping busy. I have been working on several different things at once – teaching at LCU, helping reorganize parts of IRI, reviewing the training materials for use in our South Africa and Hong Kong pilots, meeting with prospective partners, etc. Unfortunately, while this makes my life interesting, it doesn't necessarily make for good blog posts:

“Today I read books. Then I reviewed the training material I am working on. Then I edited the material a bit. Then I had a meeting. Then I graded papers.”

This is not exactly gripping reading.

So in an attempt to add some actual useful content to this blog, I am going to try to write up a short review of some of the reading I am doing. Some of this will be books we are using in some classes (real books that non-student people read, not just academic books), some of it will be reading of my own, whether that be books, blogs, interesting news articles, etc. I posted that I wanted to do things like this before, and now, with my more academic focus this year, I think I can actually pull them off.

Let’s give it a try.

Check in later this month for my first installment – I have a  couple articles and blogs I have been reading that have posed some interesting questions, so that seems like a good place to start.

Have a great October!

Philippines Log: Friday, 3/22/2013

We have made it to the Philippines! I arrived in Hong Kong a little over a week ago after a 23-hour flight. We stayed over the weekend at Ken’s church (Ken is hosting us in Hong Kong), and picked up a few final supplies before heading out for Manila on Wednesday. Compared to the flight to get to Hong Kong, the flight to Manila was fairly quick – only about an hour and a half in the air. We (Al, Ken, and I) arrived at the Philippines and were picked up by our host here, Marie, and Dave, an IRI board member who had arrived the day before. Marie took us south, stopping by a mall (to pick up a few more things we managed to remember only after getting on the plane in Hong Kong) and eventually crossing a lake to arrive at her home, a concrete and metal house on a mountain overlooking said lake.

Currently, we are preparing for the Insight Seminar next week. We arrived early, so only those of us from Hong Kong, a national minister named Cody, and Marie and her family are here right now. We expect the rest of the group to arrive today and late tomorrow. In total, there should be about 24 of us.

Seminar in Review: June, 2012 – Chimoio, Mozambique

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.

 

Next Entry: Attendance and Participation

Seminar in Review: June, 2012 – Chimoio, Mozambique (2)

[note: these seminar posts are being posted in reverse order to facilitate easier viewing on the site - this is part 2 of 3]

Point Two: Attendance

Given the radical schedule changes and the fact that our Mozambican associates really have never scheduled a seminar on their own before, our attendance was pretty much what we expected. Our first night saw around six people; over the next few days, we lost a couple of people and gained about four more. By the end of the first week, we were averaging six people a night. The second week, however, saw a decrease in attendance. Whether this was due to a certain amount of miscommunication about what to expect from the seminar or participant fatigue is hard to determine—I am planning on working with Leonard to follow up with the participants to investigate the details. In any case, by the end of the second week, we were down to three people.

While discouraging, this is not unexpected. The seminars are far more complex than many Mozambicans are used to, and it is not unusual for the stress of the material to cause some to give up. 

On the other hand, the miscommunication regarding expectations has been identified and we will be able to better communicate what the seminars are about next time. In Mozambique, many nonprofit organizations have taken to offering people food or money to attend their seminars. The offer is appreciated, of course, but it creates a situation where participants attend not to learn, but to earn.[i]  While this may sound like a nice way to provide poor nationals with money and allow them to learn, all it really does is set an expectation that “classes” equal “stuff.” Thus, seminars and other training are often valued for the prizes, not the education, provided. Once we clarified that our seminar was there to give people tools in the form of information, a few of them lost interest. Others, however, were excited to learn something they actually considered useful, and saw no need to have any other incentive.

Point Three: Participation

Of utmost importance in the seminar is participation by the attendees (which is why I usually call them participants). The seminars don’t just spit out information at the participants—it is important to us that people understand the principles we’re trying to communicate, and are able to apply them to their lives. As a result, the seminar is geared toward a lot of activities to reinforce our ideas. This is especially important in Africa, where most of the participants have never encountered these concepts before.

This, thankfully, was a great success. The participants were very engaged with what we were discussing (even those who were just there because they thought they would get food were interested and participating). There was a definite level of excitement in the group, and we noted not only a steadily increasing level of engagement from the remaining participants, but also an increasing level of excitement. Some of these activities and discussion are quite difficult and complex, and the participants were definitely rising to the challenge. This was exactly what we wanted, and we are extremely happy with the results.

Next Entry: Conclusions

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[i] These same organizations often later wonder why there isn’t any long-term impact from their training. Here’s a tip for anyone who is interested in teaching people: if you have to pay people to attend your training, THEY ARE NOT THERE FOR YOUR TRAINING. People do not learn by infection—simply going to a training session does not guarantee participation or retention, and paying your students to attend will only get them in the seat. If anyone out there is considering or has been paying people to attend your training/seminar/workshop, please just stop (note: this does not apply to workforce training by businesses – if you want your employees to know something they don’t you should pay them to learn it). OK, footnote rant over.

Seminar in Review: June, 2012 – Chimoio, Mozambique (3)

[note: these seminar posts are being posted in reverse order to facilitate easier viewing on the site - this is part 3 of 3]

Conclusion:

So overall, how did things go? I think I can safely say that while we are happy with the response from the participants in the seminar, the scheduling and attendance shows that we still need to work on our overall seminar structure here. This was expected, given the difference in culture between where we come from (the U.S.), where the seminar originated (South Africa), and the local culture priorities. One of the major advantages of having Leonard with us is that we can ask him why various things are happening, and he can give us a response that comes from inside the culture. In the end, it will be Leonard[i] who makes the final decisions on how to adapt the material to Mozambique .

One key thing we took away from this session is confirmation that our previous seminars were not some kind of exceptional fluke – these seminars really do have a powerful positive effect on the nationals. The concepts they introduce, while common to many westerners, are virtually unknown here. One example is our session on categories. We spend a fair amount of time explaining what categories are and why they are important. After going through the session, Leonard noted that, while the participants were having a lot of difficulty thinking of things in this new way, they were rising to the challenge, and excited about what they could do with what they have learned. For those of you with strong conceptual backgrounds, I want you to try to think of how you would see the world if you did not understand categorization—then understand this is exactly the case in many Mozambican (and, from other discussion we have had, many African) cultures. 

It isn’t that Mozambicans can’t think in terms of categories, just that no one has ever bothered to teach them about it, and it is not native to their culture. This is why we’re here—concepts like these are critical to developing large-scale economic as well as individual personal development. Mozambique is a place full of potential, and once the Mozambicans are able to see how to take advantage of that potential, we expect great things from this culture.

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[i] I should mention that Leonard is acting as a kind of proxy here – we actually have several other Mozambicans we are working with who are working alongside Leonard to refine the seminar in Mozambique, but because of the unfortunate schedule changes, they were not able to be here for this seminar, so I am focusing on Leonard for this account.

Mozambique: Taking Control

Yesterday, we got a letter from one of the Mozambican nationals that we know. We had wanted to work with him for some time, but the organization he was working with was being controlled by a western organization, preventing him from working with us as he would have liked. Here is a portion of the message we received:

“Now I was elected as a Chairman of [his organization]. I think we have to start the last conversation about the paternship between Safari Insight Mission (our old name) and [his organization]”

This is much bigger than the statement above would initially indicate. One of the problems we have encountered in Mozambique is the tendency of Mozambicans to simply do whatever the westerners tell them. This is a kind of cultural habit, put in place through centuries of domination and oppression. While many of the current western organizations in the country have no intention of dominating of oppressing the nationals, the fact that the Mozambicans won’t challenge them creates a system of dominance by default. Many westerners, not realizing that this cultural tendency is in place, assume that the Mozambicans are going along with their ideas because the nationals agree that their ideas are correct. In fact, it is often the case that the nationals disagree with the westerners, but feel as if they cannot challenge western authority. The statement above is a significant indicator that the Mozambicans are starting to take back control of their lives. Note that the author indicates he was elected—the process of taking back control does not need to be antagonistic or hostile, simply directed and firm. This is a great step for this particular organization, and for Mozambican nationals in general. One of our goals has been to empower nationals to take control of their own country and organizations, and it looks like that is beginning to happen.