Planning

In any organisation planning is important. If you don’t take time to think where you are going the chances are you’ll never get there! Despite its importance, however, most people find it hard work and generally unrewarding. For better or for worse I (Matt) do not seem to fall into the category of ‘most people’ in this instance. I often enjoy planning (not all the time!) and can often see possible solutions/practical ways forward without too much agonising! That said, planning in Tanzania – especially in our field of work, is not always straightforward!

Our work has a lot of variables! Since we are always looking to facilitate nationals to do the work themselves we are constantly creating more opportunities for changes, for unknowns and for unplanned circumstances. Working this way really is the only sustainable option, however I do often catch myself thinking: “if you want something done, do it yourself”. That, however, is the easy way out (despite it being an attractive temptation!). We can’t do that here, we want to set up the work so that even if we weren’t here it could continue forward! Training others to do a job you know you could do yourself is always a difficult task. However it is in these situations that we need to force ourselves to look to the long term and the eventual increased capacity in the work.

October is a very important month for our project as we hold our annual planning meetings together. We have spent the last couple of weeks discussing Literacy plans for 2010 and 2011 (we do the next year in detail, the year after in rough outline) in preparation for meetings with our language programmes colleagues from Dar. Since we are actively doing literacy work in 9 languages our plans, as I’m sure you can imagine, are just a little complex! No two languages groups are the same and so literacy plans need to be appropriate, not to mention flexible(!), for each situation. We are also working with many Tanzanians in the language areas: literacy workers, team leaders, transitional literacy teachers, basic literacy teachers. In our plans we need to consider their progress, their skills and their capacity. Considering these are often ‘volunteers’ working remotely from us you can imagine this is rarely an easy task!

We want to prepare plans that are realistic but challenging, appropriate for the people, and that meet current needs whilst also building new skills for the future. We need wisdom as to what is the next step for the work, in which areas to keep moving forward and in which areas to stop. There are lots of exciting things we could do – we need to know what the right one for now is!

Please join with us in prayer for these plans and the upcoming meetings. It is easy to look at the task ahead and be overwhelmed. Thankfully we know we are only a small part of a bigger plan, which was already taken care of 2000 years ago!