Hip Hooray, It's All Vol Day!!! (Or rather it was... in August)

So recently (as in like last month?? gosh how time flies) I spent a week hanging out with basically ALL of PC Uganda. We had our annual All Volunteer Conference, and it’s pretty much the best conference/training I’ve been to yet in country. We call it All Vol for short.

Save people who were on vacation, and our GHSB (Global Health ??), all volunteers in Uganda were required to attend. This meant there were about 150 volunteers, all in the same place, from all the different sectors – Health, Economic Development, Education, and newly formed/separated Agriculture. I know my group, which is around 40 people. I know a good portion of the Ed group before me, which is maybe another 20 people. And I know a few random non-Ed volunteers, which maybe puts me up to 80-90 people, still leaving a good portion of the volunteers unknown to me. This is especially true because many of the volunteers I knew have just left, or COS-ed. So many of the volunteers I didn’t know were from our newest group, sworn in for duty around August 7^th.

The conference began with an SNL Weekend Update type opening, with a good mix of silliness and needed information. After that, we began the best scheduling decision I’ve ever seen at one of our conferences – a technique called Open Space.

So volunteers got up and said which sessions they were going to facilitate, whether it was about travel in Uganda, working with Books for Africa to get books in your schools, literacy activities, all the way to things like yoga and American football, hairbraiding, and then back around to serious policy discussions with Peace Corps staff. I think it worked out beautifully, only having hitches if we had to move people around to different rooms and such, but even that didn’t ruffle many feathers.

The conference was technically only two days, with one day on either end relegated for travel. So we really had about two days worth of material, but it was really cool. A lot of people took notes on all the sessions, so that in the coming weeks that information can be disseminated as well as uploaded on PC UG’s private wiki for everyone to access.

It felt like the volunteers owned the conference, and it was a new feeling for a lot of us.

We also had Peace Corps Prom the last night! In which many of us bought ridiculous dresses/suit coats/outfits from our local clothes market. Some choice pictures which I stole blatantly from others’ Facebooks.

Will continuously add pictures as I get better internet.