Somehow week one in the Barefeet office is coming to an end. Previous TIE participants from Octopus had warned me that the 30 days would disappear in the blink of an eye, but it’s hard to comprehend until you are actually here. While on one hand I’ve had suffered from bouts of gut-wrenching homesickness and wondered why on earth I’ve signed myself up to 30 days outside of my comfort zone to live in the middle of Africa, on the other I’ve had moments of panic that a month isn’t a long enough time for me to achieve my objectives. Before I hop back on a plane to London I need to have:
Created a project plan for the Barefeet Arts Festival covering creative development, acts coordination, equipment, volunteers resources & budget;
Identified and approached sponsors to provide financial and logistical support for the Festival;
Created a detailed Marketing programme for the Festival; and
Created a project plan template that can be used for all Barefeet Events.
On the surface this doesn’t seem like a huge task to complete, however I quickly learned that they haven’t had any form of structure when planning these events in the past and also have little to no records to use as a reference, so this week has basically been a huge data gathering exercise to try and figure out how on earth they’ve completed this in the past without the wizardry of my best friend, Microsoft Excel?!
One thing that I’ve stressed to the team here is that I am absolutely not here to recreate the wheel. The Festival is all about the children and nobody understands the children better than Barefeet. My job is merely to take a step back and try and give them some kind of structure to work from so that when I hand over to them at the end of the month, they can hit the ground running in order to make 2019 their most successful year yet (fingers crossed).
On a more light-hearted note, I thought I should share some of my observations/funny encounters from the week:
Zambians take bus capacities as a guide rather than a compulsory requirement. Today they managed to fit five of us on to a seat which was meant to be for three. What ensued was one hot, sweaty bus ride where they basically had to wedge me out of the door at my stop.
Zambians move fast in the relationship stakes. I had two marriage proposals on the same morning (Ollie needs to take a leaf out of their book)…
The men all have a favourite premier league team and this is instantly the topic of conversation when they realise I live in the UK. I’ve had to resort to pretending I support the same team as them, as the first one I spoke to was not impressed when I said I didn’t follow football – “What?! But you come from the land of football?!”
When you see a stick on the side of the road with a rubber glove on top of it, it’s the man who lives in that house advertising his plumbing business.
