Travel
Dan: I had an 'auspicious' start (not!) to my odyssey on Friday the 19th of July. That day a windows update went awry (remember Crowdstrike?), causing chaos around the world. My first flight finally took off more than an hour and a half late as check in had to be done manually. Causing me to miss my connecting flight in Istanbul, and to spend most of the afternoon and evening and next morning waiting in lines and offices to find out if and when I could get a flight to Cotonou. I did finally and arrived late Saturday evening.
Rebecca (our second trainer on loan from SIL Togo) had a 7 hour bus ride from Kara to Lome, spent the night there and then another 3 hours by bus across the border to Benin the next day.
Lodging
Rebecca and I stayed in the Wycliff Benin Director's guest house and had our breakfasts and evening meals there. We had a 20 minute commute to the Wycliffe Benin center, we were picked up and dropped off by a driver each day.
Since the Wycliffe center is fairly new, only the offices have been built so far, the guest house is still in the planning phase. So the other participants stayed with friends and relatives scattered around the city; many came by motorcycle. In this way the costs were kept down.
Wycliffe Benin
Matchbook
On the first day we got off to a rocky start - I forgot to plug in the matchbook, and when it went down after a couple hours it went down hard and didn't want to come back up.
Ended up apping with Stefan for an hour and a half that night repairing/rebuilding the matchbook and he was able to get it working for the next days class.
Participants
We had 13 teams at the workshop - and 24 participants! (At least two of the teams did not have a second wm.)
About half the teams had only one laptop which they either shared, or one person spent most of the time using, the other one watching.
More lessons
After two days working on the matchbook most had begun to make some good progress. But we started to notice some odd behaviour with logos, for example there was a generic logo that wouldn't go away even on themes with no logo... I eventually realized that I had taken a template site from an earlier version of wildfire, and modified it for everyone to use. I realized the right thing would be to get everyone to start over with a fresh site made from the current clonemaster - no template this time. This had the advantage for the participants that they could practice the first lessons all over again. We think the WMs and the sites benefitted from this.
Rebecca did a great job as a second trainer. She took initiative to keep things flowing when I was stuck on technical details, she recognized when people needed prompting to participate in class, and she regularly made the rounds to see who needed help. Her sense of humor was appreciated by the participants.
She knows wildfire well and was quick to pick up on new elements, features, and ways of working that had changed since her last course. She helped with the audits.
In the end we launched all 13 sites before leaving Benin - Rebecca stayed up as we worked through final improvements by whatsapp with several of the teams and launched many of the sites herself.
