The nights aren't long enough!

Education actitivities have begun! 

On Monday morning, a computer lab that DubaiCare donated to the CFPEN was dedicated, with the arrival of a delegation for Dubai, traditional singing and dancing in Arabic, Afar and Somali, and speeches made by the education heads in French and rusty Arabic.  This planning has impeded a lot of meetings around the building (including our initial English class for CFPEN staff) as the staff has been dedicated to its preparation for weeks.  As a result, despite a failing microphone, it was a fabulous event - attended by all of the development and education officials in the city.

As for our own team, we put in a little over a solid week of 9 hours days (in a country that runs on half-days) designing a training for the three staff members (manager, librarian and computer technician) of each of the 6 AED-funded Teacher Training Centers in the country.  Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, we dealt with drafting staff job descriptions, creating a vision for "CRP" of the future, planning use of their mobile book trunks, developing individualized and CRP work plans and exploring management tools that they can and should be using.  As we were discussing the things that prevent us from acheiving our work objectives, I quipped that for me it was the power outages.  As though some jin were listening, the electricity went out twice.  Most precisely, as I was setting up the powerpoint show.  So, the dedicated learners huddled around a laptop and worked efficiently from the gleam of its 13" screen.  It was an absolute success.  I am looking forward to meeting them, and their counterparts who were away on Hadj, during our follow-up "formation de proximite" throughout the year.