Appropriate Technology Workshop Part 3

The start of the workshop was delayed by a day because of a scheduling miscommunication. This meant that our already intense five-day curriculum needed to be packed into four days. But then, we wouldn't all be there if we didn't like a challenge. In theory, having an extra day should have made the organizers feel less rushed, but somehow, it seemed to make us all feel like we needed to get more done, so even though it was like gaining a day, we still had a lot to do.

I ran to the market and tried to find some supplies for the event. I bought some peanuts in the shell, which were really hard to find (and which I was actually severely overcharged for since there was only one person in the market who hadn't already taken them out of the shell) and when I got home, I discovered that they were actually immature peanuts and wouldn't work for the sheller we were using. Oh well. It was also at this point that I discovered that they had drinking yogurt (a thin dairy product that tastes like yogurt, but is only slightly thicker than milk) in the supermarket and started trying to down one a day (it was much healthier than my soda habit and much cheaper than living off of juice). I don't know why Tanzania doesn't have much drinking yogurt, but it was big in Kenya and I was thrilled to discover that Zambia had banana flavored yogurt.

I was also avoiding the hotel's kitchen and living mostly off of peanut butter and bread. I decided to try to change things up by buying some potatoes and cooking them (remember, the room had a hotpot). It didn't go so well. I boiled some water. Put some potatoes in a cup and poured the boiling water onto them. Let them sit for five minutes and dumped out the water and poured more boiling water onto them. I repeated this about 4 times before adding a bunch of salt and trying to eat them. Turns out that potatoes prepared this way are borderline edible. I was pretty hungry too, so I'm guessing that under almost any other circumstances, they would have been completely inedible.

In the evening, the participants started to arrive, and I was torn between trying to meet them and trying to plan for the next day. Since I was presenting a session on problem framing and didn't have a whole lot of sense how to do it, I wanted to really work the lesson over in my head since I didn't have a whole lot of time to talk with Amy about what she had in mind. We also needed to do some final prep work to get the spaces ready for the next day, so I was disappointed that I didn't get to spend more time getting to know people before the workshop started.

The next morning we did our welcomes and introductions and everything was going really smoothly (the extra day pretty much guaranteed that). We told everyone how much we planned to accomplish and it sounded pretty daunting, but everyone was really energized about the whole program. During the tea break, Amy came up to me to show me the lesson plan that she had put together for my session so that it would have some continuity. It was a lot better than what I had, so I decided to base my lesson mostly around her idea. She also gave me the assignment to set up some bowls of mangoes with a towel over them (one part of the workshop was to have them work in teams to design mango-processing technologies since they were so abundant during that part of the year, so we wanted to have a dramatic reveal of the theme). Although I never watched cooking shows much, I was trying to use Iron Chef for inspiration. A nice big stack of mangoes (including a few strategically stacked around the bowls) that could be shown with adequate intrigue. In hindsight, I should have spent more time nailing down how I was going to do my session.

The mango reveal went really well and people were definitely entertained. My session did not go well at all. I was jumping back and forth between Amy's lesson plan and my own and presenting it like a high school teacher by providing way too many examples and constantly checking if there were any questions (in some ways that's my natural way of presenting, but it didn't do much to help me connect with my audience). The content did not come across clearly, the follow-up activity was explained poorly and I definitely did not seem like a confident presenter (I kept doubting myself as I tried to pull the bullet points from the lesson plan). The audience was very nice about humoring me and we got through the lesson, but I was mortified by how badly I had botched it. I have to say that Amy did a good job of coaching me through it without shaking me further or letting me get discouraged and without letting the rest of the room know how much I needed coaching.

I felt like I regained some face while I was walking around and talking with teams on a one-on-one basis (well, at least in a small group setting) and I was able to redeem myself by the time everyone was working on their projects in the afternoon. As soon as we had our trainers' meeting, I announced that I wanted to try leading another session because I definitely needed practice. Everyone was supportive and reassuring about how my session had gone, which was a little disappointing since I wanted really blunt feedback, but I was grateful for their kindness. Amy signed me up for another session and I knew I needed to spend a lot of time and really figure out what I needed to do to get it right.

But in the mean time, there were a lot of projects going on. I was talking to one team about what it would take to design a centrifuge for honey extraction (and the possibility of making it pedal-powered), and then another team about the principles of an evaporative cooling system (I wish my physics degree had given me a more practical background in thermodynamics), and then another team about building smokers and solar dryers and then another team about oil extraction and then back to the second team to talk about shelling peanuts and so on. It was a lot of fun and a really great way to get to know everyone. By the end of the first day, we had definitely accomplished a lot, but we could see that we had our work cut out for us.