Feel it! It is cold!

This is a picture of me this morning in the office when I arrived. There was frost on the ground, and in a country with no central heating and poorly fitting doors and windows - that's no joke!! I'm getting laughed at for not putting on the heater. There's not much awareness of global warming here. Environmental issues are basically off the radar, so it's polystyrene cups and two bar heaters all the way. I can hear the polar bears crying, so I have a hat, a two scarfs and gloves with the fingers cut off so I can type. This and vegetarianism has cemented my team's view that I am a bit weird. :o)

We have trained about 1300 people at the moment. It's so hard to evaluate whether the training is effective or not. We are doing pre and post tests to see if people have retained what we have been telling them for the past two days but it's not that easy. One lady, when questionned how she got worse from one day to the next explained how she couldn't write so she gave the test to her friend to do, and a different friend the next day. Unfortunately she chose wrong and got the less clever friend to fill in the post test so it looked like she had actually lost information during the training. If you sit and talk directly to a participant you get the sense that they have learnt and enjoyed the sessions, but to record this in a nonliterate population is very difficult. I would welcome any help in this area!!

The test is 15 identical true and false questions. We now read the questions out together and fill the tests in at the same time to support those who have more difficulty reading. At some point we had to stop and ask the ladies to stop saying 'uh huh' all together when it was true, and 'uh uh' when the answer was false. Some just can't follow. More creativity is needed!!