HIV training sessions

Once we had finished up our marketing and ISAL sessions, we were able to start working on our focus for the second half of the cycle, HIV/AIDS and gender sessions.

As Caritas, the partner organisation we are working with, is part of the Catholic church we are restricted on the HIV issues we can run sessions on given their stance on the use of condoms. So it was decided that we would focus on HIV nutrition. This topic allowed us to provide training sessions for all the beneficiaries on nutrition while also focussing on the issues that are particular to people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHIV).

This was a really interesting topic for us as the majority of the volunteers had little to no knowledge on HIV/AIDS work, and even less on why nutrition is so important for those living with HIV. Because we had limited time left in our placement we weren’t able to identify groups of people within the farm living with HIV, and so we decided to run the session as a general nutrition session, but with some specific information relevant to caring for people living with HIV or for people living with HIV. It was an interesting session from a cultural exchange perspective as well as we couldn’t just use the food pyramids the UK volunteers were familiar with as they didn’t include traditional Zimbabwean foods. We spoke to the National Aids Council in Zimbabwe and we were able to get access to some specific resources they had on nutrition for people living with HIV in Zimbabwe. It was really interesting as the staple food Sadza obviously has a key role to play, but there were some sources of protein that were less familiar to the UK volunteers such as insects, which we didn’t fancy adding to our Zimbabwean diet!!

The session went down really well with the beneficiaries who were really interested in the general nutrition issues we covered as well as the HIV specific ones. They asked a lot of really insightful questions, most of which we were able to answer from our research and they have asked us to run more similar sessions for them.

It was unfortunate that due to a lack of water availability and the movement of our debrief event forward we were unable to run a second HIV specific session. However, we were able to put together a community event to raise awareness of HIV and to discuss issues including stigma and transmission.

Community sports day

It took us a little bit of time to work out the bureaucracy and clearance processes we needed to go through in order to organise a community event, but we eventually worked it out and scheduled two in for weeks 7 and 9.

Our first community event had the aim of bringing the community together. One of the things we had identified in our initial survey at the start of our placement was that a number of the beneficiaries didn’t know each other and the majority didn’t work together in farming their plots. We hoped that a fun community event would bring everyone together and get them talking.

Our community liaison team worked really hard to plan and organise a community sports day which we were going to hold on a flat bit of ground just outside the boundary of Kentucky farm. Unfortunately before we could run the sports day we had to clear this flat piece of ground. It was a bit of a hard slog for the volunteers but with a great deal of energy and enthusiasm they managed to clear the ground and roughly mark out our race track for the day.

The community liaison team had identified that they wanted to have a cultural exchange as part of the day and so they wanted to have a British picnic. As we were lacking in scones, cream and jam they opted for pasta salad and egg sandwiches. We were aiming to have all 216 beneficiaries attending and so we had to cook enough for everyone. This proved to be slightly challenging when we only had 2 saucepans and 2 hobs! But we eventually managed to get the pasta and the eggs boiled and thousands of sandwiches made.

We ran races for the beneficiaries including sack races, sprint, three legged race and the tug of war. It was great fun, and all the beneficiaries were smiling throughout the day. They even seemed to enjoy our “British picnic”! All in all a very successful day.

ISALS Monitoring and Evaluation

Once we had made it past mid term we knew we only had 5 week left on placement and so everything kicked up another gear!

The ISAL team finished their final ISAL training session which went down really well and the marketing team started on their set of three training sessions. While the marketing guys were planning and delivering their sessions there was still plenty of work the ISAL team needed to do. ICS is meant to promote sustainable development and to that end we have a team plan that we work to, that is part of a broader overall project plan that will cover the work of a number of cycles of volunteers. Within that project plan there are a number of short term, medium term and long term outcomes that our work is supposed to feed into.

This means, that as we did our initial survey on ISALS at the beginning of our training sessions to measure the level of knowledge within the beneficiaries we also have to do monitoring and evaluation throughout the placement to see how much the beneficiaries are benefitting from the work we are doing.

For each individual training session we had to prepare a plan before we ran the session. We ran each session 3 times to reach all our beneficiairies and after each session we would do some informal feedback getting the beneficiaries to give us a thumbs up or thumbs down for how each session had gone. As you might imagine they were very polite and usually gave us thumbs up!

However as we finished our sessions we had to prepare more formal M&E, and so we decided to do another survey of all the beneficiaries to gauge their knowledge. We were quick to point out to our interviewees that this was definitely not a test of their knowledge on ISALS but rather an opportunity for us to determine what further training was needed. We were very pleased to discover that overall the knowledge had definitely gone up among those who had attended the sessions, but there was still plenty for the next cycle to do!

Visit to Vumba

After our mid term review on Thursday we headed into a 5 day weekend, which gave us a great opportunity to get out and about. 

 Friday and Saturday were spent in Mutare, and one of our ICVS kindly took some of us fabric shopping and to her relative who is a tailor. We found lots of amazing material in great patterns and we have ordered lots of skirts, dresses and shirts made, so we may be coming home with a whole new wardrobe! Here is a photoof my first Zimbabwean outfit!

18 of us headed off to Vumba in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe, on Sunday which is about 30km from Mutasa. We spent Sunday relaxing at Leopard rock Hotel, a 4* hotel which has a small game park, horse riding, walks, and lovely grounds. We headed straight off for game viewing and were lucky enough to see zebras, Kudu, antelope, ostriches and monkeys. Unfortunately we didn’t see the giraffes, but the park was absolutely beautiful and we really enjoyed our tour around.

Once we had enjoyed the facilities and seen our fill of the animals we headed to our accommodation for the evening. We were staying in a lodge nestled in the hills, which was beautiful, remote and completely cut off from the outside world – no wifi or mobile signal. I was lucky enough to be up in a cabin on the hill above the main building and had a beautiful view.

We had an amazing dinner, where we had more veggies than we had seen in the previous month, and we all ate until we thought we might burst! Given the remote location we had an amazing view of the stars and the milky way and we spent the evening around the fire outside singing songs and just enjoying the great outdoors.

Monday morning was a lazy affair, allowing us to lie in and relax in the gardens. We decided to do one of the walks offered by the lodge to a waterfall having been told it was only about 30 minutes away. What they forgot to tell us was that it was 4km down hill to reach the waterfall, and the only way back was to climb 4km back up the hill. The waterfall was lovely, but the walk back up the hill was painful and by the time we arrived back at the lodge I was happy just to lie in the sun and read my book for the rest of the afternoon!

We stopped at a lovely view point on the outskirts of Mutare called Prince of Wales view point, where you can see across the border into Mozambique, and where local craftspeople sell stone carvings. A lot of us managed to get our souvenir shopping started!!

Mutasa and Mid term review

Following our first two successful ISAL training sessions and starting the research for our marketing reports, we decided to visit our friends in Mutasa. The DOMCCP team are working about 30km from Mutare in Mutasa at a boarding school called St Matthias. Mutasa is a beautiful area, surrounded by hills and we were made to feel very welcome.

It was great to see our friends and they gave us a tour of the school and where they were all staying. Once we had seen that they took us to their hang out spot, a place with a beautiful view called Edwardes, where a previous resident had built numerous towers, which gave a great view of the surrounding area. Once we had soaked up enough sunshine and beautiful views it was off to the Headmasters house for a Brai (or barbecue). A particular highlight was the little puppy who lived there, who was very adorable! It was so lovely to hang out, eat great food and have a bit of a boogie through the afternoon.

Once we were back from Mutasa it was straight back into a busy week running up to mid-term review. We managed to squeeze in two more ISAL sessions at Kentucky, and finalise our marketing reports all in the three days before mid-term review. We also spent some time working on our mid-term report and our presentation.

We arrived at St Josephs, where we had our orientation, on Wednesday evening, ready for 2 nights of catching up and having fun. Thursday morning was a really uplifting morning as each team presented their achievements for the first half of the placement and the challenges we had faced. We had plenty of achievements to talk about, our ISAL sessions, our marketing reports and our plans for the rest of the placement. We also had plenty of challenges to talk about due to us being the first ICS team working with Caritas, but we hope that we have managed to identify the best ways to deal with the challenges we are facing.