Planning?

So in a place where I can barely plan what's going to happen in the next 8 hours, I just spent the morning with one of our language teams planning all of their literacy activities for the coming fiscal year (yes, we're like the Ethiopians - our new year starts in September!). And for those of you who know my personality, it's also quite a stretch for me to look beyond tomorrow and make plans for an entire year at a time!

But it was quite nice, actually, to be a part of yet another round of literacy planning with this team. Because I've been here for so long (yes, three years is an incredibly long time for an expat to live in these parts), I've been able to see a bit of progress with this team, and to see some of the bits to completion, and to see how one bit follows on from the next. I almost feel like I know what I'm sorta supposed to be doing, after doing this for a few years now! And that's a nice feeling, too, knowing that I've got a bit of experience behind me to be able to work with the team to come up with some reasonable plans!

And it's also quite an encouraging time of year - looking back at what we've accomplished (which is quite a lot considering all the factors here: teacher trainings, writers workshops, ABC Books and story books, newsletters and calendars produced...) and looking ahead to the coming year (more books published, more teacher training, more writer's workshops, developing the primer, establishing some more literacy classes ...). And I'm excited about it! Our meeting today, though darkened by some strong words to one of the team members who is just downright lazy, was really a very positive one, and one which we all left feeling quite excited about the work to come.

Tomorrow I have a planning meeting with a different team, in a very different situation. Because of some funding cuts and other personnel issues, we didn't get much literacy work done at all. It was a bit disappointing because we had made good plans last September, but weren't able to carry out hardly any of them. And some folks in our administration are encouraging the team to put their focus on some of the other aspects of our work, rather than on the literacy. So it's a bit of an uphill battle to keep the team motivated to do any literacy work at all - but to me, it's SO important! I mean, if they focus on the translation work, and they end up at the end with a book which no one can read, then they'll be saying, "why didn't we do literacy all along...?" Anyways, I know I'm a bit biased, and everyone always thinks that THEIR part of the work is the most important, but quite honestly, in this case, I do think it's a rather important bit of the "whole picture"!

So hopefully I'll be able to communicate well with the team tomorrow, that I'll be able to listen well to them, also, and that we will be able to come up with a good plan on how to move forward with this work, and not just let it grind to a halt because we ignored it...

Maybe this planning stuff isn't so bad afterall.