Wednesday 28 July - 1st day of our workshop (part one)

Wednesday 28th of July was a long day.

We were picked up at 9am to go to 'Tasty Menu' for our breakfast. The staff bus driven by Abubakar was the same one that had picked us up at the airport the previous day and driven us from Abuja to Yola on the January placement.

At 'Tasty Menu' Funke had the rice flour pancakes and said they were quite nice. I had white rice and stew but Dayo and Bode were not impressed with the food and opted for a 'snack' from the downstairs 'eatery. They had fish pies which they said were quite tasty and it does seem that pies in Yola are of a superior quality to the meat and fish pies I have tasted in Lagos. I look forward to tasting one of those fish pies before I leave Adamawa this time.

'Tasty Menu' seems to be quite popular in Yola. During our January placement we had all our meals there. On Sundays, we saw young couples and families come there for what was clearly a special outing. Unfortunately however, the food there was not as good as it had been on our previous visit and perhaps, because most of the volunteers were women with more discerning tastes, the prospect of having all our meals at 'Tasty Menu' was quite daunting.

From 'Tasty Menu' we were taken to Adamawa State Universal Basic Education Board (ADSUBEB) headquarters and show into the Board room which is also the Chairman's office. There we were welcomed by Asma'u Joda (in the picture on the right), a non executive member of ADSUBEB who is largely responsible for introducing DIFN to ADSUBEB and facilitating Diaspora Volunteering to Adamawa State.

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Asmau is a formidable and very well informed woman who is also very passionate about education and gender equality. These are qualities that she shares with the Chair of ADSUBEB Dr Salihu Bakari.

I was pleased to see people like Asma'u and Mustafa Ahmed (PA to the Chair of the Board)who were now old friends, as well as several other familiar faces of people whose names I did not remember. I promised myself that in addition to learning a few more words of Hausa, on this visit, I would also remember more people's names.

While we waited for other board members to arrive, we watched BBC News that was headlining the visit to India of UK Prime Minister David Cameron.

When all the Board members had arrived and were seated, the first event on the programme Margaret Leneke had given us, the meeting at the Executive Chairman's Office, got under way. The Chairman gave us an introduction to education in Adamawa State and thanked us for coming. When he invited me to make a response, I introduced myself and thanked the Chairman for welcoming us to Adamawa. I also said a little bit about the January placement and the impact it had had on me and my work in London as Programme Leader for the BA Education and Community Development at the University of East London and a Trustee of the Africa Foundation For Development. I then invited each of the members of the team of Diaspora Volunteers to introduce themselves which they did very eloquently. When Tony said he was a Tiv from Benue State, the Chair asked him where the cattle were. This it turned out was a joke about an occasion in the past when Fulani had left cattle with Tiv people while they went to war only to come back and be told by the Tiv that they had eaten the cattle. For this reason Tiv are referred to by the Fulani as Munchie men in what had become a shared a joke.

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These introductions turned out to be a useful rehearsal as, after some refreshments consisting of half a deliciously seasoned free range chicken, we were taken to the conference hall where the workshop participants were all assembled in tiered seats for the Opening Ceremony . We were shown to seats front of a table on the stage raised well above the floor of the hall. Board members were seated behind us on the stage. Christian prayers were said at the beginning and of the ceremony and Christian prayers were said at the end of it. The National Anthem was sung and Dr Bakari made a long speech in which he welcomed the participants, thanked us for coming and emphasised to the participants how valuable he regarded the work we would be doing with them. He also referred to the 10 week strike in the State which had ended only recently. Once again, for the third time that day, we introduced ourselves. Having been somewhat unprepared for the formality of this part of our programme, the previous introductions we had given turned out to have been useful rehearsals for this main event.

After the formal introductions, the board members left and the participants who had travelled from all over the State some making journeys that took as long as 4 hours in some instances, were given their lunch.

Once lunch was over, it was time for our interactive session and an introduction to the use of "post its" for sharing ideas. Participants were given a post it each and asked to write down what they hoped to get out of, what was being referred to as, 'the 10 day workshop'. They were asked to stick these statements on sheets of flip chart paper around the hall so that other participants could take a tour of them to see what other participants had written. Observations from participants were then invited. After some comments from the audience, the session was rounded up and we left to visit the Centre for Women and Adolescents before going to dinner at Asma'u Joda's family home.

........ to be continued