It's a long way to Lilongwe...

I've just got back from a really encouraging programme quality visit to Lattitude Global Volunteering's ICS programme in Malawi. Malawi is a long thin country in southeast Africa, bordering Zambia, Tanzania and Mozambique. It's one of the lowest on the Human Development Index (HDI) in Africa, with 85% living in rural areas and an economy reliant mainly on agriculture. With the capital Lilongwe in the south of the country and the communities of Mzuzu and Sangilo located in the north (and no internal flights) it was a long drive after an even longer flight (via Addis Ababa in Ethiopia) but well worth the journey. And I'd forgotten just how BIG the skies in Africa are....

Long roads and big skies

For my first 4 days I was in the town of Mzuzu, which by the way you should look out for on Sainsbury's supermarket shelves in the coffee aisle among the Taste the Difference range (I bought a 1 kg bag direct from the cooperative and can vouch that it's gooooood). But coffee aside, my first two days were spent in meetings with the Lattitude team, made up of a Country Manager (Matt) and 2 Programme Coordinators (Chisomo and Adriano). We firstly reflected on the volunteer learning aspect of the programme in the previous cycle of volunteers and how to prepare for the next cycle, and secondly explored their education project and how they're getting on measuring progress towards the outcomes and ultimate impact they set out to achieve. 

Mzuzu coffee - highly recommended!

On the third night I was there, the new team of volunteers arrived from the UK to join their Malawian counterparts in order to attend a two day in-country orientation. As well as observing the sessions led by the Lattitude Malawi staff, I also facilitated a pilot "introduction to volunteer learning" session through the new ICS resources that we produced earlier in the year. After long evenings of proof reading in January, it was fantastic to finally see the resources in the hands of the volunteers themselves and I'm looking forward to hearing more about how they're used through their whole placement.

Volunteers present their small group work back to the whole group at in-country orientation

Facilitating the pilot session on "introduction to volunteer learning"

Volunteers writing personal learning goals into their new ICS resources

After the in-country orientation, I visited the rural community of Sangilo (3 more hours north) where Lattitude's education project is being delivered. It was the first time I've been to such a rural ICS placement and just the kind of placement I'd have wanted to go on myself... if I was still in the 18-25 age bracket. If only. The volunteers live in counterpart pairs (one UK volunteer and one Malawian) and stay with local host families, one pair even living with the local village chief! The community is located on the shores of Lake Malawi and volunteers are unlikely to get in a vehicle (apart from the odd shopping trip to a nearby bigger community) during their whole 10 weeks. So it's an opportunity for them to really integrate with the community (who couldn't be more welcoming) and work alongside each other on their project activities. 

Grace and Innocent in their host home...

...and with their host Mum

Visiting host homes in the community (Lake Malawi in background and Tanzania beyond that)

Counterpart pair preparing the evening meal at their host home

Before the long journey home, I also managed to squeeze in a visit to one of the community's pre-schools where ICS volunteers are supporting teachers to develop new resources and encourage varied approaches to learning. It was great to see that even within the space of one cycle, teachers had adopted more participatory teaching methods and were experimenting with visual aids and learning through play, all of which had led to increased concentration levels and regular attendance from the children. It was such a good opportunity to witness the impact ICS volunteers are having first hand. Just wish I could have stayed longer. But year two annual reporting awaits.....

Learning through play

Volunteers facilitating participatory approaches to learning

Teachers adopting new visual aids developed by volunteers

Football Beyond Borders Strategy Workshop

In January I became a trustee of Football Beyond Borders, a grassroots student-led organisation which uses football as a catalyst to cross national, racial, social, political and religious boundaries in order to ('scuse the pun) tackle inequality, discrimination and prejudice. Check out their website for more info... www.footballbeyondborders.org 

FBB members with journalist Jon Snow on their 2009 tour of Turkey, Syria and Lebanon

Football Beyond Borders was established in 2009, following a conversation on a train home from a SOAS University football match in which team captain Jasper Kain challenged the players to travel together to Iran in the coming summer. The hope was that a grassroots student-led organisation could facilitate cross-cultural dialogue and transcend the media hype. However, in the wake of the disputed Iranian elections that year, the team’s visa applications were rejected and a decision was made that similar goals could be met through a tour of Turkey, Syria and Lebanon. The month-long tour that followed had a profound impact on many of the players as well as the communities they visited and teams they played against. The potential of football as a tool to engage with a diverse range of issues and communities, from Iraqi refugees in Syria to Kurds in Turkey, far exceeded even the player's expectations. As a result of this initial success, annual international projects confronting specific issues pertinent to each region have taken place in Ghana (2010), Egypt, Palestine and Jordan (2011), Brazil (2012) and Bosnia and Serbia (2013). This year they are heading back to Brazil to take part in the Salvador Legacy Games, an international youth tournament to be played 2 months after the World Cup with a focus on what the legacy of the event is for the residents of Salvador’s favelas. Each team of young people will partner with a different community in Salvador in advance of the tournament and will stay with these communities during the tournament. The issues addressed in all these projects have been wide ranging, from human-rights abuses to a lack of educational opportunities and provisions. The short video below captures this better than any of my ramblings could:

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What started with broad international aims found a focus closer to home following the summer riots of 2011 that started in London and spread across the UK. Many of the young people now involved in the work of Football Beyond Borders grew up in communities that were affected by the riots, and there was a mutual feeling that the skills and experiences developed through FBB projects could be well used to address some of the underlying causes of the unrest. Following the same model used in the international projects, FBB members embedded themselves in communities and began to run football workshops alongside other activities such as post-practice mentoring sessions, but this time on a long-term basis. In partnership with Youth Futures UK, a youth organisation based on an estate in a deprived part of Camberwell (South London), and Archbishop LanFranc School in Croydon, Football Beyond Borders has designed and is already delivering a wide range of projects that link young people to opportunities for their personal and professional development - whether that be in employment, education or enterprise. 

So yes it's a football-based charity, and no I don't play, understand or even particularly like football. But what I do know is that sport, whether it's cricket in India, baseball in the US or football in the UK, is a powerful influence in the lives of many and provides a real opportunity to break down some of the barriers in today's society, particularly for young people. So how did I get involved?

I've been following Football Beyond Borders for some time through their founder, Jasper Kain, who is also the brother of my friend Poppy from Cranbrook School days. Jasper and one of his friends Tom Bateman (who is now also a trustee for Football Beyond Borders) came out to Sri Lanka to help in a community I was volunteering in following the tsunami nearly 10 years ago. As my blog doesn't go back that far, I've managed to dig out a few photos of our time in Sri Lanka. Those were the days....

Working with the hard hit community of Kirinda in the South West district of Hambantota

Jasper and Tom get stuck into helping individual families recover from the devastation

Our rickety old bikes used to cycle the 90 minute round trip to the community every day

Football Beyond Borders 5 years BEFORE Football Beyond Borders?!

Since his time in Sri Lanka Jasper's can-do attitude has taken him a long way from digging trenches in Kirinda, first to a degree and time as president of the student union at SOAS and now as one of the driving forces behind Football Beyond Borders' transition from an international football tour initiative to a more sustainable grassroots organisation in the UK as well as overseas. The organisation is going through a really exciting time as it formally registers as a charity in the UK, and grows in terms of partnerships, donors and beneficiaries. So when Jasper mentioned they were looking for a new trustee to act as an advisor on strategy and programme development I jumped at the chance.

So that takes us up to the reason for this blog post. On Sunday, I met with 15 FBB members to help them develop their strategy for the next three years. Up till now, Football Beyond Borders has grown quite organically driven by the raw enthusiasm of those who set it up and are still passionate about taking it forward to the next level. As is often the case with small start ups, it is currently shaped by the activities it delivers through it's range of projects, which while strong in isolation lack an overarching strategy to link them together towards clear outcomes and ultimately the impact they want to achieve.

Jasper sets out the agenda for the day

In many ways the day was similar in structure (though naturally different in content) to the strategy workshops I facilitated with the Palestinian women at the women's centre in the Gaza refugee camp in Jordan in December 2012 (see blog post December 9th 1012). So we started by revisiting the vision laid out by the FBB leadership team and checking that it captured the broad aims of the organisation. Then the bulk of afternoon was spent identifying, prioritising and analysing the problems that Football Beyond Borders wants to address through it's projects. As in the case of the women's centre in the Gaza refugee camp, it wasn't clear whether the projects already being delivered were the right projects for the problems they want to address. I used the example problem of a car not starting, and how it can waste time, energy and resources to address the problem before working out the cause first - much easier to explain when you're not working through an Arabic interpreter this time! So the aim of the sessions was to focus first on the problems and then check them against existing activities to see if they provided a logical response.

Starting with problem identification, everyone was given 5 post its (what else?!) to put forward problems they thought Football Beyond Borders should be addressing through their work. Next, we clustered these problems into thematic areas, ending up with a total of 12 broad problem areas. Recognising that some of these problems fell outside the scope of Football Beyond Borders' vision and mission and that they currently have limited time and resources, we then gave everyone 5 matchsticks to vote for the 5 problems they'd like to prioritise. This very participatory democratic process means that FBB members are central to the foundation of their strategy, and I was really pleased to see that as a result of this an interesting range of problems ranging from the more delivery focused "lack of safe spaces for young people in the UK" through to the more advocacy/campaigns targeted "lack of voice around controversial issues such as economic inequality in society" (with a particular focus on the football industry) were chosen.

Identifying problems

Grouping problems into similar themes

Voting on problems to condense/focus 12 problems down to 5

The 5 selected problem areas - the foundation for the strategy

Next up, we divided into 5 groups with each group taking one of the selected problem areas and carried out a problem analysis, drilling deeper into the issues around each problem especially causes and effects, then presenting back to the whole group.

Problem analysis

The final part of the puzzle (or first part of the new strategy depending on how you look at it!) was to then break into 3 project-based groups: UK-focused delivery work, international-focused delivery work and cross-cutting campaigning and advocacy work. Reassuringly, these project groups were able to identify many links between the project activities they already deliver and the 5 problem areas identified and prioritised in the earlier session. However, they were now also able to see a clearer rationale for activities already being delivered as well as identify potential new activities for the 3 year strategy. 

The final session of the day provided an opportunity for focused planning/prioritising for year one of the strategy, again in the 3 broad project groups. When each group presented back on their one year plans I was really impressed with how quickly the earlier problem analysis sessions had helped shape the direction of the coming year. The below scribble is my first stab at pulling it all together into some kind of visual representation of the day, but I'm looking forward to seeing what the leadership team come up with more formally and supporting them to deliver on the strategy over the coming months and years.

Home Sweet Home

On September 17th 2013 I got on a plane to visit Tony and Yolanda O'Brien in Belgrade, waiting to hear if the offer I'd made on a flat in London at the weekend had been accepted. And nearly 5 months later on February 8th 2014 I got on a plane to Bangkok, waiting to hear if the sale would exchange and complete while I was away. People say moving house is one of the most stressful things you'll ever go through in life, but I really wasn't prepared for what the last 5 months had in store. If you don't want to read the whole sorry story then I won't be offended if you just skip to the photos at the bottom. But for those of you wondering why I've been such an absent friend of late (promise I'll make it up to you now!), please read on......

It was generally pretty smooth sailing up until December, going through the motions of mortgage applications, searches and surveys. The seller's tenants had moved out, I was ready to move in, and I thought I'd be hanging tinsel on my very own Christmas tree before the year was out. That was until we unearthed the £8000 of unpaid service charges that the seller owed the managing agent of the property, dating back to 2006. So in the days leading up to Christmas, rather than sorting out Christmas trees and tinsel I was negotiating with solicitors about legal semantics in order to ensure there was a binding agreement that the total value of service charge arrears would be retained as part of the terms of contract of sale, and that they would be paid directly to the managing agent without the risk of the debt falling to me as the new owner. Turns out that takes a long time. Especially at Christmas. But with an agreement about the arrears finally in place by early January, I felt confident I'd be in my new home well in advance of my work trip to Bangkok. I was wrong.

Although we had agreement on the part of the solicitors that the service charge arrears had been separated from the property itself, we still lacked various important documents from the managing agent regarding the upkeep of the property (there are six flats in the whole building). In leasehold properties, the freeholder (or the managing agent acting on behalf of the freeholder) has to provide a management pack of information such as the buildings insurance policy, freehold title, and (at least the last three years of) accounts - demonstrating how the service charges that the leaseholders pay are being used. Between the estate agent and myself, we called the managing agent 4-5 times a day EVERY DAY for the whole of January asking for this management pack. Sometimes they didn't even answer the phone. Not easy when you're also trying to research alternative venues for a regional workshop in Asia and trying to follow FCO travel advice about the changing political situation. But anyway....

Having agreed to a completion date of Friday January 31st, I had a removal van booked on Sunday February 2nd (the last weekend I could physically move in before flying to Bangkok the following weekend). The seller had agreed to fly over from Ireland and move her furniture out of the flat on Thursday 30th, so on a rainy Friday when South Western trains also decided to cancel all their trains into London, I set off from Richmond to Balham on the 337 bus in the (vague) hope that we would be able to exchange and complete and I would have the keys in my hand by the end of the day. What I wasn't quite prepared for was the removal van parked outside the flat (that was meant to be emptied the day before) with the owner herself still inside. Joined by Mum and my godmother Gill for moral support, we camped out in the coffee shop opposite, watching the whole process unfold with half an eye on the clock for the countdown to the end of the banking day. Unsurprisingly, with sofas still coming down the stairs at 3:30pm and still no management pack in sight, by 4pm we were back at the estate agents ready for a large G&T. Estate agents should have this on tap by the way. Far more useful than those fancy coffee machines and posh fizzy water in big glass fridges. 

The only silver lining of the above situation was that the seller had not only agreed to hand in her keys to the estate agents before her flight back to Ireland, but also agreed (in writing, before you all think I'm that daft) to let me move my furniture/boxes in over the weekend as planned. So on Sunday February 2nd I drove up to London from Kent with the removals van and officially became a squatter until we were due to finally exchange and complete the following week. That didn't happen either. Obviously.

Fabian (my eight year old nephew) being helpful...

And not so helpful...

So that brings us back to the beginning of this story - getting on a plane to Bangkok with all my worldly possessions locked up in a flat I didn't yet own. With the UK working day starting just as the Thai working day was ending, I spent most of my evenings in Bangkok, emailing and on the phone to solicitors, managing agents and estate agents. Then on Wednesday February 19th, 2 hours before my mortgage offer (of sixteen weeks!) expired and 5 months (to the day) after my offer was accepted, I got THE call from my solicitor to say it had all gone through - simultaneous exchange/completion. Phew.

So I'm writing this in my new little home. I'm still waiting for someone to knock on my door and tell me something's gone wrong and it's not mine after all but with every lightbulb I change, picture I hang and meal I cook it feels more and more like the home I've been waiting (far more than 5 months) for. Like I said at the beginning of this post, I know I've been an absent friend for most of 2014. But I'm looking forward to getting myself some chairs so I can have people round for dinner and set up on skype so I can catch up with those of you who can't just pop round. I'll give you the grand (as grand as 30 sq metres can be) tour through my laptop....

I just have to finish this rambling with the hugest thank you to some very patient people who I've bored with my tales of seller ignorance, managing agent incompetence, removals angst and mortgage timeline worries. You said the right things at the right time, and if in doubt provided me with wine/coffee/a hug/McDonalds (again at the right time). You know who you are. 

Bikes and beaches, Thailand

My post-workshop holiday began with a 100km bike ride with my friend Naomi who lives in London but is working on a BBC documentary at Bangkok airport at the moment. It was so nice to get back on a bike and get my legs moving after a week of walking round 3 points of a triangle. (Hotel room, restaurant, conference room. Repeat.) It wasn't meant to be 100km - we were aiming for 70km but got to our lunch spot early so managed another 30km after lunch. All good training for the RideLondon 100 miler I'm doing in August. Gulp.

In terms of location, apart from going to see the ancient capital of Thailand (Ayutthaya), we weren't really in a tourist area so it was nice to see some of the real Thailand as we peddled the streets with our guide Krit and Bobby our support driver/out-of-the-car-window photographer/ice cold flannel provider. Definitely no slumming it for this one!

Setting up the bikes with Krit and Bobby

Under arches...

And electricity cables...

Past chicken satay stalls...

And elephants...

And paddy fields...

And temples...

And billboards...

And over bridges...

King coconut stop at Ayutthaya

Lunch stop at 70km

Tired (or full?!) after lunch so drafting Naomi (-:

Still fresh 90km in!

Finished!

Celebrating with cold flannels... 

And cold beer!

After our day of cycling Naomi had to go back to work so I headed down to Krabi for a few days of beach time. I stayed at a little guesthouse called The Laughing Gecko with bamboo huts set in a cashew nut orchard at the quieter Hat Noppharat Thara end of Ao Nang (the Benidorm-esque centre of Krabi's tourist area). Basic but friendly and with wifi so I could email and call my solicitor about the flat which I was still waiting to exchange and complete on. So I didn't have the most relaxing of evenings (during UK working hours) but kept busy during the days with kayaking, snorkelling and exploring beaches.

On the penultimate day of my holiday I finally received the call I'd been waiting over 5 months for (more about that in my next post) - simultaneous exchange/completion 2 hours before my mortgage offer expired. Talk about going to the line...........

So THAT's what a cashew tree looks like!

Bedroom in bamboo hut 

Bathroom

Waiting for the solicitor to call...

Kayak trip to the limestone cliffs, caves and mangroves

Lived off these - satay sellers by the beach - and mango juice from the next door stall

Monkey walk to Centara Grand beach 

Centara Grand beach from the Monkey Walk

For Jenny and Penny who actually stayed at the Centara Grand at Christmas - I didn't dare cross the rope but thought you'd love to revisit the sun-loungers!

Centara Grand from the sea

Boat trip to Railay beach

Railay rock climbers

Long tail boats at Railay beach

Cooling off at Railay

Snorkelling off Podha island

Completed flat sale. Done. Home time (-: