At the core of our training is what we affectionately call FBT or Field Based Training. We spent week 6 of training in Chiciquian, a city located up high in the Andes in the department of Ancash. We traveled to this small town of about 4,000 people situated at 12,000 ft above sea level to put on a “Business Simulation” for a group of 110 university students, all in SPANISH. Sounds cool huh?
Since the beginning of training we had been preparing materials to teach students about how to start a small business. The 16 SBD trainees split up into six groups and them divided the following topics amongst ourselves: intro to small business, leadership, market studies, accounting, marketing, publicity, quality, etc. Within our groups we were responsible for researching our subjects and then presenting our findings to the rest of the group. This way, each one of the six groups would learn about all the subjects and be prepared to teach all of them to the students at the simulation. Easy enough?? Yeah right!
Each group ended up spending hours and hours preparing their own materials then spent lots of time learning then preparing the other topics as well. We focus on NFE (Non-formal education) techniques in the PC so we had to come up with lots of games, activities, and inter-community investigation tools as part of our teaching methods. As this wasn’t hard enough, remember, it all had to be in Spanish!
Saturday night we left Lima on an overnight bus and when we woke up in the morning we had arrived in a beautiful little town located in the middle of nowhere. Finally we were in Peru.
We spent the day exploring and adjusting to the altitude. At 12,000 ft your lung capacity is… I don’t know, maybe half of what it usually is. Until acclimatized (which can take months) just a brisk walk will leave you out of breath quite possibly with a headache. Some trainees got sick and puked just from hiking an easy trail. To give you an idea of how high it physically is, I’m pretty sure the Rocky Mountains peak around 12-14 thousand feet and I know for sure that the highest point in the state of Delaware is 447.85 ft (believe it or not there is plaque to note the spot).
Check out the amazing view!
1 comment:
Wow, what an amazing picture of you standing on the edge of the valley. It's reminds me of the scene in the Lion King when they hold Simba up on the edge of the rock - "everything the light touches is our kingdom." Is the sky bluer there? My family is convinced that the sky is bluer in Canada, I'm sure there is some scientific explanation for this, less pollution or something.
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