Muraho!
I noticed that I’ve focused a lot of my blog posts on explaining the remote nature of the internship and giving a general overview of the project, however, I haven’t really given much insight into what specific tasks we have had. I also noticed that it has been a while since I have posted an update here.
So I thought this would be a good time to share what we’ve been up to…
Our first major task was to complete a detailed business plan and timeline which would outline what the first year or ‘start-up phase’ of the yogurt kitchen would entail. After completing this, it was time to move on to our second major task: Training Sessions. This is what I’ve been spending the past couple of weeks focused on.
I was most excited for this phase of the internship as business plans and budgets aren’t exactly my specialty.
Preparation:
Our first step was to ensure that we knew about probiotics and their health benefits – as we are doing this remotely, I had to rely on theoretical knowledge from past intern reports and resources provided by WHE.
Our supervisors, Bob and Stephanie, thought it would be easier to teach others about the yogurt production process if we had had the experience of making it ourselves. Unfortunately, my packet of the probiotic sachets, which are needed to make the yogurt, never made it all the way to Trinidad 😦 – Luckily Katie was able to get hers and update us on how that went!
We then began adapting materials and making our presentations and then it was time for the big day!
We worked with Bonheur, a University of Rwanda student, who was super helpful both in preparation and during the sessions themselves. It was also just really nice to work with someone our age who is also a student!
The sessions:
We separated the training into two sessions- one which was focused on the health benefits of probiotics and the other on the yogurt production process. We were happy to get a lot of participation from the volunteers that attended both sessions. It definitely lived up to my expectations!
Since the completion of the training, the volunteers at the NGOs have been practicing making yogurt more regularly to get consistent high quality results.
It was exciting to get some progress pictures and videos last week!
Believe it or not we are now entering our last week of the internship!! So we’ll be spending lots of our time finishing up everything so we can leave the project off in a good place.
I’ll hopefully update you soon on how this goes!
Talk soon,
Eva
Eva Chang - Western Heads East 