Thursday and Friday were spent working with 15 young leaders on the topics of roles and responsibilities of leadership; problem solving; working in patrols, as well as sessions on UK culture, world guiding and craft and game ideas for the girls to take back to their units.
Although the girls were initially quite quiet with only a few speaking out in English, the sessions were a resounding success - by Friday the group were enthusiastic when they arrived and even the quietest were making their best efforts to speak and write in English, throwing themselves into all the activities we had prepared, and also teaching us games and songs of their own. Games and team building challenges went down a storm, though we're slightly disappointed (and frankly unsurprised) to say that the Cambodian guides defeated us in almost every contest!
This series of sessions were hugely fun and rewarding for us all, especially after months of GOLD prep and build-up. There were some anticipated translation mishaps and we tried to work on initial stumbling-blocks as the training progressed by speaking slower and explaining activities more clearly.
Buzzing from our successful trainings we were in for more fun yesterday evening, when Sochivanny, acting Chief Commissioner here, took us out to see some of the city by tuk tuk, ending with dinner and elephant patterned harem pant shopping at the Phnom Penh night market. We were pleasantly surprised with the street snacks, perhaps with the exception of barbecued chicken tails (not what we thought we had purchased!).
This morning was our final training day at HQ, working on fundraising and PR with GGAC staff and committee members. This was a slightly different group to that which we had expected, so it was a bit of a challenge to step the training up a gear, but generally the session was well-received and we were pleased with the opportunity to work with a different audience.
Thus that concludes phase one of the project here - it's hard to believe that we're almost a week through, time is certainly flying! We'll leave you for now with happy thoughts from our 'friendship pond'!
