Lost in time

This whole week I’m involved in the assessment and basic training of new national volunteers. It’s a nice process to be involved in. It is good to see 30 young persons (between 25 and 34) enthousiastic about helping others in their own country. During the first day we did a whole day of assessments. NYSC and vso got 12 people to be the assessors, most of them untrained and un-experienced.(I was one fitting into that category.)

A little info about the content: for the people that are international volunteers; it was sort of the same as our assessment to become an international volunteer. For all non-vso people; I cannot exactly tell you what we did because it was the same as our international vso assessment.

I say it was sort of the same, because we now had to assess 30 persons instead of 4 to 7 in a real international assessment setting. So imagine 4 groups of 7 participants doing the ‘production line’ activity, one group after the other. Roughly that would take 30 min per group. So with simple maths you would know 30minx4=2hours. On the agenda it was scheduled for 1 hour.

Then the participants had to take place in a group discussion. The plan was to have 4 groups, we reduced it to 3 to safe some time (as we lost quite a lot of time during the first session). For this session the scheduled time was again 1 hour; the real time needed 3x25min=1hours 15 min, but at least we safed some time, we only  lost 1 hour and 15 min in our schedule. After the lunch the participants needed to write a small essay to check if their language skills are accurate enough to be teachers. This took them 30 min and after the essays the individual interviews were planned.

The assessors were paired up. I was paired up with Giwa, a NYSC guy who also did this for the first time. But we turned out to be a team. I was the main interviewer but he really listened and asked the right deepening questions. This session started when we were scheduled to deliberate on the out-come of all sessionsL.

In the end I started to add all out-comes of all sessions to get a rather objective sight on who we should or should not pick. We had to pick 20 of which maybe only 14 will really get a placement. So to speed up the process we picked the people with the highest score. We shortly (we is Chinwe, ms Awakassien and I) debated on the women issue (one out of four did not belong to the highest scores). But I kept to my pass and I said 75% of the females entered just like that, so don’t bother about 1 that didn’t make it.

Ms Awakassien announced one on one if people were selected or not. (As Dutch and tactless I can be I would have just use the X-factor method; just say which numbers are trough and which not.) But with already 3 hours behind on schedule, we had to do it one on one. It took and other 2 hours. In the end we got in the car around 19.30. I had to be in the office before 7.30 that morning, so you could say it was a long day.  

Sometimes after days like this, I wish Nigerians would be able to plan better, but then again now I have something to write about. Thanks for that.

BTW: I am really pleased with the outcome of the assessments. I really think we got a strong group of new teachers out of this all.