First Week On the Job

        Last week was my first week of working at the Kimberley GRS office. Unfortunately there wasn’t much action going on that week, so most of the time I was literally twiddling my thumbs. I’ve never had an office job, or a 9-5er so it was definitely a new experience. What we worked on the first week was going over our intern job descriptions as well as getting all the handovers from the last interns. I’m taking on most of the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) work and also sharing coach development responsibilities with Nick. I’m incredibly excited for the 1 on 1 sessions with the coaches. So how Grassroots works is that it has the curriculum of HIV/AIDS prevention that is delivered to kids at schools by coaches that we recruit. The coaches are from the same community that the kids go to school in and are between the ages of 18-30 years old. They are hired based on whether we believe they are the right role models that kids can really look up to. The other part of the coache’s job is going to coach development sessions. This is where we teach them employability skills like computer skills (word, excel, powerpoint), resume writing and interview skills just to name a few. Their contracts at Grassroots are only for 2 years and we want to make sure they have the correct skills to be leaders at their next jobs after GRS.

            Last Wednesday Nick and I joined Thembi in going to one of the schools in Roodepan to watch on of the interventions where the coaches are working with the kids. It was really great to watch and see how the kids responded to coaches. The class I was in was a very large class (about 35 kids), and the coaches played ‘Gender Stadium’ with them. In this session they talked about what was good about being a girl and what was good about being a guy, and about gender norms. A lot of the answers given by the class surprised me, and really highlighted how there has been a lack of any type of feminist movement in Kimberley. The boys said how it was great that they could be with many women and also how it was expected for the women to clean the house and the men to work. It was great to see the coaches bring up a discussion with the kids about how we don’t need to follow these gender norms and how everyone should challenge them. I’m not sure how well it stuck with the kids but it’s a discussion that they obviously had yet to discover. It makes me excited about GRS of how they’re being trailblazers in their community by bringing up topics that would otherwise be ignored.