Training the Trainers

The training day started like many others, with confusion and delays. Nevertheless we arrived after the customary battle in the traffic, not always going in the expected direction down the carriageway but always in the safe hands of our driver John, with a few angels working hard on the right and left.

Two heads are better than one, even if one is a dead fish…

The day before we selected 20 of the 34 participants to train as trainers of others and this became a lot of fun today as we changed places and became the disinterested and distracted, wandering away, talking on our mobile phones, to see how the local doctors and midwives would handle their difficult pupils. It was also entertaining (for us) to create controversy over differences in practice, drug dosage and route of administration and see how they could make peace and retain control of the lecture or seminar. In general they did well (when they realised we were playing a game, which took a while for some) and entered into the spirit of the exercise and we felt at the end of the day that we had a number of promising trainers who would be useful in our future courses. The general idea is to reduce gradually the number of foreign visitors until the Life Saving Skills course can be administered and run entirely by nationals, with one or two visitors as observers and evaluators.

So we survived and probably succeeded in our first Tanzanian LSS course. The next one will be in a different setting altogether, up country on the border of Rwanda and Uganda, on the shores of Lake Victoria, where the rainy season has truly started and the mosquitos are awaiting their Great British Breakfast.

But that’s another story…

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