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Akash Patel

2nd Year, Sauder School of Business, UBC

 

From the moment I discovered the Sauder Africa Initiative application, I knew that this was going to be an once-in-a-lifetime experience, one that I could not afford to pass up.  After being accepting into the program, the hard work began.  Our team usually met once a week on Monday night for about three hours.  In the beginning, these meetings were extremely useful in getting to know each of the team’s members.  As the term progressed, I started noticing how comfortable we were becoming with one another, and knew that this was going to be very important when we finally got to Kenya.  Around February, we started giving presentations to each other during our meetings on various topics, such as the geography of Kenya, health and safety concerns while in Kenya, and what social entrepreneurship means.  I really enjoyed these presentations because not only did I learn something new, they also gave me the chance to practice my presentations skills.  Frances Chandler, our program coordinator, also had some interesting guest speakers to come in and speak with us.  Two of these speakers stood out in my mind.  The first was Stephen Nairne, managing director of the Lundin Foundation (http://www.lundinfoundation.org/s/home.asp).  What made Mr. Nairne so interesting were the experiences he had with working in African countries, and the insight he provided on Kenya.  The second was Steve Hosein, a former participant in the Sauder Africa Initiative.  Steve provided our team members with valuable advice based on his own classroom experiences while in Kenya.  He stressed the importance of making our students feel comfortable in the classroom, insisting that it would make teaching the material significantly easier.  I hope that once teaching actually begins, I will be able to use his advice to my advantage. The next part of the process was getting familiar with the teaching material and creating lesson plans for the lessons that each of us would teach.  At first, I found it difficult to work through the resource guide because of the sheer quantity of information.   Thankfully, I was able to get through the entire book, and move on to the part that I really enjoyed: creating lesson plans.  While in Kenya, I will be teaching with fellow teammate Faizal Shivji.  Faizal and I met frequently during May, and we bounced ideas off of each other while creating our lesson plans.  I thought that this was an effective way to create our lesson plans.  Thus far, I have learned through experience that this Initiative is front-end loaded – lots of advance preparation that will make things easier for us while in Kenya.  I leave for Kenya tomorrow, July 15 – I am so excited to finally be there! I cannot wait to meet our students and start teaching, reaping the rewards of our thorough preparation.