Getting settled in

On Tuesday January 8 a smooth five and half hours flight with Air Canada brought me to Bogota where I had for the first little while a hotel booked. On Wednesday I started right away looking for an appropriate apartment in one of the neighbourhoods near the SENA offices where I will be working. By Saturday I had decided on a nice small apartment and I will be able to move in on January 16. The research I had done in advance from Niagara through the website "metrocuadrado" paid off, because I could right away do my search very targetted. One of the local realtors proved to be very helpful.

My apartment is located about 10 minutes walking from the SENA offices, so that will be a healthy excercise each day. In addition I took a membership at a local gym. The area where I will be living is called Rosales where "Zona G" there stands for "Zona Gourmet". I will need that gym membership!

Last week was hard work to meet a deadline the ACCC team had to submit our 2013-2014 work-plan by Friday January 11. From my hotel room in Bogota I made a few long nights in order to feed the team in Ottawa with some of the required input from my side. In addition I had to get a number of logistics organized such as a local bank account, a local cell phone plan and some office equipment.

Yesterday was my first Saturday in Bogota. I decided to explore the city on foot and ended up walking a good three hours along Carerra 11, past "Zona T", "Parque de la 93" and "Museo Parque del Chico". It is such a lively city with parks, busy shopping streets and thousands of small restaurants and stores. It will not be difficult at all to be entertained here in my free time. I found a store to be compared with the Canadian Mountain Equipment Co-op. They organize day and weekend treks in the mountains around the city. I better first have my body get used to the 2000 meters altitude as well as get in better shape before I join them!

The project work-plan for the coming year is ambitious but - in my humble opinion - realistic. We need to start with some further community needs assessments in our two "pilot" areas in the south of the province of Bolivar. I plan to go a week to each community with some colleagues of SENA and the provincial government in late February and early March. The output of those visits will be more detailed "base-line data" which will later be used during the monitoring & evaluation visits to see what the measurable outputs (numbers of people trained and able to get better work and/or do their own businesses better & safer), outcomes (changed behaviours based on better training) and impact (changed/improved economic and social circumstances) in the targetted region.

During the week of February 11-15 we will  have a regional coordination meeting in Lima, Peru with the EFE teams from Bolivia, Peru and Colombia (CIDA funds this program as a regional activity in order to stimulate these three countries - and others - to increase regional cooperation).

In April and May we will try to bring some Canadian experts to Colombia from the Canadian Mining Sector Council and from the expertise in Canada on so-called "access training", programs for people who have not been able to complete elementary and/or secondary education (we also call this group of trainees & students sometimes "non-traditional learners"). At the end of May we will bring a few colleagues from Colombia to western Canada where they will attend the annual ACCC conference hosted this year by Okanagen College. We will also visit a number of colleges in that part of Canada who have strong training programs in mining and agriculture.

In June and July I will be assisting my colleagues of SENA to write "terms of reference" for Canadian colleges who - based on those "ToRs" - will show an interest to be involved in the program. In October or November a few Colombians will travel to Canada to meet with representatives of 8-10 short-listed colleges, and then make a choice of 4 or 5 colleges to work with SENA on new and improved training programs for artesenal mining and small scale agriculture. These colleges will then start working in Colombia in early 2014 for a three year period.

There are more details, but I will fill you in along the way....

In future blogs I will try to add some photos. Right now I am trying to figure out how this fancy new iPhone works that my wife and kids gave me in December for my birthday....

Saludos,

Jos