Facilitating Gender

I’m standing in front of 20 people when it suddenly occurs to me: I believe my boss has greatly misinterpreted my resume. This has produced interesting results. The first of which being the assumption that I know how to do anything at all. The second being the misplaced confidence in my somewhat lacking community outreach skills. This week at my internship we had a Capacity building training. Let me take a short break from my story to complain about the term Capacity Building. Firstly it means almost nothing; it is used every couple seconds to describe anything from improving the police force to training peer educators as is the case in the story. I have decided to kill the next person who uses the term. Moving on to the “you know what” building training session, it is the second day, lunch time. My supervisor comes to me and says, “Are you ready to lead the Facilitation session on Gender”? I look baffled, so she asks if I remember when she asked me yesterday if I could do it. I remember her only asking me if I liked the training and I said yes sure. Was this the moment she was thinking of? I told her I wasn’t aware that they wanted me to do that today. She says something like”ah ok so it’s ok if you do it now?” Now? Yes right now. Ok so here it goes. I have something like 5 minutes to make some notes on gender studies and now I’m standing in front of the 20 people only 3 of which are women. All of which are 20-28 years old. This is where I have my revelation. The first couple minutes aren’t so bad. I stammer of course and can feel my voice trembling as I try to talk slowly in English. Besides my greatly lacking facilitation skills, I have the added advantage of trying to explain gender equality and sensitivity to many many men who have spent the first two days of the session making off color jokes and flirting with anyone who got close enough. This by the way is completely normal male behavior but still makes it a little awkward when you ask them about gender stereotypes and one guy says he thinks girls shouldn’t climb trees. “mhmmm mhhmm” I say as I write it on the board, barely containing my feminine rage. “So what else do you think are some stereotypes in Kenya?” Silence. This is pretty much how the whole thing went. So I’m off to a good start I think. Next week apparently I will be teaching a computer class( another imaginary skill on my resume?) Wish me luck.