Leadership Conference

December 4-7
The last four days a team of four of us (Brad, Lisa, Scott and I) have had the privilege of spending time with the teachers and staff at Africa New Life Ministries. We facilitated a leadership conference, which consisted of a teacher track and a project manager track. This was a very precious time with these top notch leaders. It’s hard to even begin to relay all that the last four days have held, but I’ll try to at least summarize some of the key parts.


Good Ol’ Icebreakers
We started them off with a fun little brain teaser—the Nine Dot Game. Imagine nine dots in three rows of three (in essence forming a square). The challenge is to connect each of these nine dots using only four straight lines—WITHOUT your pen ever leaving the paper and touching each dot only once. If your brain wants to be teased a little bit, I suggest you give the puzzle a shot before reading further. This was the way we introduced the idea of thinking outside the box (a little clue if you’re still working on the puzzle). Oh if only you could have seen these leaders wrestle with this puzzle! This brain teaser quickly became legendary—and forever after we heard the phrase “theeenk owtside da box”.

Scott led another icebreaker where we divided the group into chickens, elephants, monkeys, and dogs. We had them blindfolded and mixed up, then they had to find their herd by making the animal sound. I tell ya, there’s nothing like seeing a group of blindfolded Africans barking like dogs and clucking like chickens. Actually, we found even their animal sounds needed some translation, for I guess in Rwanda their dogs said “bo bo bo”, not “bow wow wow”. I thought they were the monkey group for the longest time! =)


Teacher Track
One of the top highlights of the teacher track can be summed up in one word—“BINGO”. Lisa Hotchkiss did a brilliant job of bringing some new teaching techniques to the Kayonza New Life Academy staff. She began with this concept: there is an appropriate time for play, and there is an appropriate time for learning. But there is ALSO a third category—a time where students can learn by playing and exercising creativity. One of the teachers' favorite tools was addition, subtraction, and multiplication Bingo. Once the teachers understood the concept of the game (as well as the fact that we had prizes for the winners), they were allllll over Bingo! In fact, the word “Bingo” was shouted out the rest of the conference whenever there was even a hint of the need for celebration.

Another fun tool that Lisa brought over was a motorized model of the solar system. WOW—this was quite an eye opening tool! These teachers had never really seen anything like this, in fact some of the basic solar system info (one orbit around the sun is a year, one rotation on the earth’s axis is a day, the fact that there are trillions of other galaxies out there etc.) was brand new to many of these teachers. I had the privilege of talking them through the model in small groups (with some very needed help from Science Man Tim). Oh the questions they had—everything from the simple “are you sure?” question, to questions about life on other planets, different atmospheres, the ozone layer, methods of attaining information, the latest science discoveries, and on and on. It is quite an honor to see discovery and learning take place for the first time.



Manager T rack
Let me just start by saying that Brad REALLY worked the ANLM ministry leaders! While we in the teacher track were off playing Heads up Seven-Up and talking about discipline techniques, Brad was teaching quality principles and practices for process improvement (try saying that 10 times fast!). During the first day Brad had the managers come up with four project goals for the year 2008, and the list they wrote is quite impressive!
*Goal 1—To see the New Life Women and Family Center grow from the 31 students it currently trains, to 100 students in the year 2008.
*Goal 2—To reengineer the communication process for child sponsorship.
*Goal 3—To Implement Small Group Ministry in New Life Bible Church.
*Goal 4—In the year 2008 New Life Academy in Kayonza wants to run a major competency program for its educators.

Day 2 for the manager track was pretty grueling, as Brad kept the managers going from 9-6 (with some room for breaks of course). We were all pretty impressed by Brad’s stamina to stand up and teach complex topics for 9 hours! We have no doubt that he was relying on the Lord’s strength in a major way! During day 2 Brad taught the ministry leaders the basic steps to define, plan, and manage a project. Though it was a long day, when I talked to several ministry leaders, they were overwhelmed with gratitude for the valuable training they had received!


Final Thoughts
Amidst everything, I think one of the biggest highlights for all four of us was having the privilege of getting to know these quality leaders from Africa New Life Ministry! This is really a very blessed team of men and women who love the Lord and love people. They are living out their calling as they carry out the purpose of Africa New Life Ministry—to transform lives by preaching the gospel and acts of compassion. ~LM