Just in Time
I met Cameron yesterday at the conference. He is World Vision staff from New Zealand who has projects in Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, and one other African country I can’t remember. It was interesting to learn about him and his work—one of the best things about traveling here is meeting people and learning their stories. When I came in March I met a WV staff person from Senegal.
In any case I was telling him that I was leading devotions and leading some trainings with very little lead time to prepare, and he laughed and said he was doing the very same thing--he called it Just In Time speaking. We both had a laugh over it. He was speaking at one of the sessions for the upper level managers and had missed devotions in order to prepare, and I was giving a session on Christian Leadership later for which I had not prepared and was going back to my room to try to put some thoughts together concerning it. We agreed that we needed to trust in the Holy Spirit to make things work for us. I have been impressed with the quality of the training, and the commitment of the staff that is here to learn. I am most impressed with WVU's commitment to children. One of the sessions I sat in on was devoted to the protection of children, how to address the legal and community aspects of it. There was a lot of brainstorming in the session and you could tell how passionate the staff was about it. They put in a full day. It starts off with devotions at 8:00 a.m. and goes for an hour. They begin with singing for about 15 minutes, and then I preach/teach for about 40 minutes. They go into various meetings at 9:00 a.m. take a half hour bread at 11:00 a.m., go back into session and break for lunch at 1:00 p.m. They go back into session at 2:00 p.m., word until 4:30 p.m., take a half hour break, go back into session until 6:00 p.m. I ran into Christine who was the Koro-Bobi ADP leader when I first came in March 2008. She was transferred to another ADP in northern Uganda shortly thereafter and I haven't seen her since. She is aware of our partnership at St. Thomas More and was telling me that the number of girls enrolled has gone up significantly. In fact, she said that the girl's dorm is now full and they have to find a place for the overflow. I think she said that the dorm holds 60 girls and 67 girls are enrolled. That's very exciting. I'm concerned about where the other 7 girls are staying and will find out next week when I visit the school.
