RJF Day

Yesterday was a long day of travelling, and a chance to visit the town of St Johns. Its a small place, only a couple of major streets, and some small shops. I'm starting to get a feel for the town, we've eaten out a lot here, and it seems the menus all consist of burgers, fish and chips. My vegeterian friend Patrick is not too impressed :)

Today was return JF (RJF) day, which consisted of a couple workshops desinged to help us reflect on our first 4 months back in Canada and gather some ideas for continued impact with the chapters.

The first session was a guided reflection looking back from conference last year to the present. It was neat to see how my perspectives have changed on topics from leadership to goal setting and planning.

Next we launched into a session designed to get a glimpse into what everyone has been up to back at their chapter. I heard about Patrick's killer faces of Twapia, a set of stories and pictures of people he met during a typical day around town. Mike K told us of a sweet frosh event involving a minibus, bargaining at the market, and lots of IWE!

After lunch we moved into challange sessions, where each person in a group of 5 brough a challange to the table and everyone spent about 30 minutes giving advice. I got some great ideas for dealing with SFU's not sending a JF this year: hoping to engage some chapter members in the writing of a mega-guide to being a JF. The plan here is to both leave behind a written and visual training manual (yes video footage too) and also hopefully training volunteers in how to be a JF at the same time. If all goes well (yeah, this may be a bit hopeful) then we could end up sending 2 JFs next year. It would be a pretty sweet recovery after this year!

The last structured session was a guide to coaching future JFs. I took a lot of great notes on coaching and leadership, and am really looking forward to trying some of these things out, even if I don't apply them to JF coaching explicitly.

During our unstructured session at the end of the day I was talking with Victoria (one of the Burkina JFs) who had a really neat idea for a member learning that ended up engaging the chapter for over 7 hours on a Friday night! Might be bringing this one back to SFU once I get my translation skills sorted out, and adapt it to be Zambian focused.

Other highlights of the day included seeing Alfred, Mike K's counterpart who came here to visit. That guy is so intense, he just keeps on going! I'm looking forward to hearing his speech tomorrow after lunch. Its definately awesome to be seeing everyone again, and meeting lots of new people, and I'm well on my way to building a list of 10 cross-Canada contacts to bounce ideas off when the need arises (one of my key conference goals).

Tomorrow I'm looking forward to sector meetings (Value Chains in Southern Africa), and hoping to get to chat with some of the OVS who are back for conference, just to see what they are all up to and get a feel for how Zambia is right now. It should be a good day to rebuild some of my relationships overseas, and set myself up well to bring that back to the chapter.

Oh, and there has been some pretty serious hackie sack going on in the hotel here too! Seems our skills have been improving every time we try!

-Mike