Monday in Tamale

Only three more days to go before the participants go off to various assignments, and there is still much to cover. This morning the plan was for the team to take a tour of the GILLBT office in Tamale and have "coffee break" with the staff, giving them an opportunity to meet and talk with some of them. Then they were going out on another language learning expedition before lunch....this time without a leader to help them! (While they were out the leaders would be working on a lot of the remaining logistical details needed to be done before they can send the participants out to their different assignment locations.) After lunch they were to have some unstructured time as the leaders try to help them slow down to a pace of life that is more like that they will experience out of the cities; many of them will likely have spent at least part of this time doing their laundry by hand.

In a couple of hours after dinner, the team will discuss some tools that will help them to understand others better; they will go over different degrees of orientations (such as people who are more time oriented vs more relationship oriented) and also talk about dealing with conflict, especially in our partnerships. The leaders will also have them shift doing their daily goal setting with leaders to doing it with their partners instead. Now is when the participants begin to shift emotionally from bonding with the whole team to focusing a bit more on developing their partnership as they prepare for their coming month away from the rest of the team.