Toronto Training

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Toronto is a beautiful place to have a training session. I am spending a week here preparing for my trip to Zambia, and am loving it. The university of toronto where the majority of the training occurs is incrediable. Sorry Calgary folk, but this place makes my school look pathetic. Like I said, beautiful.

All the junior fellows going to Zambia and french west africa are here this week together, staying in a house that EWB rents. The house is a tiny duplex that is currently trying to hold 25 + over energetic youth. The neighbors must hate us. Sleep is hard to come by, as there is always tons of great discussions just waiting to happen we every person here. Also our sessions always seem to go a bit (*cough*) over time.

The session today that hit me the most was an introduction to rural livelihoods, which dealt with the way people make a living. It's a pretty broad subject, incompassing personal skills, physical assets, social interactions, and the effects members of a household have on each other, among the thousand other things that life entails. We did an exercise where we analysed some simple case studies about a rural farming family. My group focused on a man who grew maize, blah, blah, blah, a whole description of his life and problems. When we got back to the big group poor old Dan ended up getting stuck with representing our hypothetical guy in a casual conversation with representitives of other case studies. I launch into a nice description of myself and my family etc. Then the next guy looks a bit confused and says he has the same family.... Anyway I'm talking to my two 'wives' which both happen to be guys and have just made a bit of a fool of myself. So I guess my big Aha! moment of the day was when we all realised just how much information there was to get from each different member of the family, and how much everyone left out about the others. My dude, the 'head' of his family, had no idea what his two wives were up to on their personal plots of land, that the two of them were fighting, what his kids were doing... He did spend lots of money on beer for his buddies though, what a great guy !!?!

Anyway it was all great fun. We had dinner at a great Ethiopian place and heard lots of stories from the staff of National office about the beginnings of EWB and how the JF program has progressed in the last three four years.

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Photos

Rob, Hans, and Nick
Junior Fellows hardly working! I mean...