If you’ve been madly clicking your longtrekhome bookmark these past days with no satisfaction, wondering whether it was your computer that had a virus or if we were perhaps neglecting our blog-baby, please don’t call don’t panic. The explanation is the answer to the following skill testing question:

What happens when you put 21 Canadian, 21 Tanzanian and 12 Kenyan youth together in a lodge for a week?

Answer: Explosions of volume, dance parties every night, very little sleep and a whole lot of learning. And very little time or opportunity to attend to our blog-baby.

Right now the two of us are somewhere near Midland Ontario running a ‘Participant Orientation Camp’ that kicks off a couple of Canada World Youth exchanges with Kenya and Tanzania. We are responsible for facilitating workshops on things like cross-cultural communication, how to be good to your Canadian host family, hopes and fears for the coming program, anti-oppression training, etc. It’s kind of like running a mini program except that we get to run away right when they start to get on each other’s nerves. There’s extremely limited access to internet at the lodge so we de-camped to the local library for a few precious hours to catch up on the rest of life.

Interesting tidbits we’ve picked up so far: Kenya’s official language is English; the East Africans were worried about feeling racism here but so far have been pleasantly surprised; we now know how to greet Kenyan royalty.

More updates to come!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 13, 2005 at 4:34 a.m.. You can skip to the end and leave a response.