How many accountants does it take to run a training day?

For an audience of 17, apparently 5 Rwandan Accountants and one Brit!

Having finally got the formal Rwandan greeting down to a fine art, we finished the last of the Health Centre audits just over a week ago.  Before coming, I certainly had not imagined that during these visits I’d sit through more than one meeting with an accountant while she was breast-feeding, or that I’d take a long, bumpy trip in an ambulance, wedged between a woman with a sick bucket and a man with a hacking cough...  It has certainly been a lot of fun exploring the country and working closely with the PIH finance team on this project.

Last week, to follow up our audit visits, we ran 3 training days (one in each district) on financial management for the Health Centre Accountants.  In preparation, I have spent the last few weeks writing up a summary of our observations and recommendations, finishing off the new financial monitoring and reporting templates for Health Centres to use, helping the finance team put together a finance manual for Health Centres, and preparing the training course.

For the first time since getting here, I felt properly stressed last Sunday night.  We hit printing issues - a small malfunctioning printer, no paper, and unsurprisingly, no one to help at 10pm on a Sunday evening.  And then there was the fact that I felt nervous about sitting through training courses that I have been so heavily involved in preparing and having absolutely no idea what’s being said.  But I need not have worried; we solved the printing problems early on Monday morning, and then the team did a wonderful job in presenting the course, a fact that was highlighted by the good understanding the Health Centre Accountants showed when they completed the training exercises, rather than a miraculous understanding of Kinyarwanda by me.

And here is the A-Team of the training world in action:

Gorilla and volcano adventures to follow shortly...