"Success Challenged Activity"

19:35 28 October 2009

Well, Monday I had what I suppose could be called a “mixed success” program with my leadership club. We had what on paper seemed like it could be a good idea, but the implementation for it fell through a lot and it didn’t end up at all how I and Kelechek (the name of the group) hoped it would. However, having a debrief about it at the meeting today was a good opportunity to analyze our mistakes, see what went wrong, and figure out how to correct them in the future. So while it was a bit disappointing for me Monday, I have faith that the mistakes and correcting them will prove to be a positive experience for the future.

Before Saori left, she proposed the idea of holding some type of career festival for the kids of our villages. Career festivals and even the stereotypical parents telling about their jobs day in elementary school are an integral part of many countries’ job and work cultures. Thinking about future professions and seeing the pluses and minuses of each profession is an important process to us but that here seems to get little to no attention. Before attending university or selecting a trade, students have scant opportunities to decide which profession they want to pursue and even less information on how they could go about it. Saori’s idea was to hold a type of training/informational seminar for village kids in the upper classes at schools and have people of different professions come to speak to them about their professions, how they became them, and the benefits and drawbacks about them.

After she left, Kelechek and I began to try and organize the event, first surveying schools to find which kind of professions they would be interested in hearing from, and then organizing the date and logistics of the event. While the first part went well, so well in fact that I probably relinquished too much control to the kids, the latter part was plagued with difficulties and resulted in a somewhat lackluster seminar. I spoke with Saori about how proud I was of the kids and found that my role in the group was diminishing from that of leader to that of facilitator, something excellent for the long-term sustainability of the group and would make the transition easier when I leave next year. I fear that I may have made that move too quickly though, and a discussion post-event with the Director of the Dotz (the organization and place where we meet) where she expressed her disappointment went something like “Yes, they are doing well and are motivated and organized, but they are still kids and sometimes you need to step in and make sure they are taking the proper steps.”

The event Monday was significantly smaller than we hoped. We invited 45 students and about 20 showed up (and more than half of those late). But more importantly, out of the ten people that we invited to speak about their professions, only three showed up and we found two last minute to talk in lieu of the others. Other problems abounded with time limits and the speakers needing to leave early, the questions our kids prepared with sloppy and off-topic, and their was no clear flow of the program as a whole. We had designed this day as an experiment, with the hope of doing school-wide assemblies on the same topic in the future throughout the village. And while it did not go as planned, speaking with the participants after the seminar, it did seem like they still gained some interesting information and knowledge.

I won’t bore you with the details of how we plan to improve it in the future here, but I believe that future events based around the same principles could yield a lot of success and a very under-examined portion of Kyrgyz children’s lives.