By Allan Wasega, KamiLimu Committee Member
A recent email from Dr. Chao to the team sums up what many of us are experiencing:
2020 was the year when I won a big award, and two of my long-term desires were coming true. I had just been booked to speak at TEDx, and I was confirmed to travel to the University of Oxford on an all-expense-paid trip to speak at a conference. You see, I have always looked at the world as a village that is accessible to me. And in that view, I envisioned myself speaking at universities around the world, travelling the world, and then returning home to my apartment, my loved ones, and my bed. Instead, the cancellation emails started coming. When I met you at KamiLimu’s launch on February 8th, while we had most of the year already planned, nothing in my many spreadsheets read ‘In case of a pandemic.’
No one foresaw that this year would pan out this way. The past four months have reshaped how people interact and conduct their routine activities significantly. Initially a nondescript disease in far-land China, Covid-19 has grown into one of the most dangerous and devastating health outbreaks the world has experienced lately. Government and community response has been swift to protect people and stop the spread of the virus. Locally, the country was placed under a dusk-to-dawn curfew and movement curtailed in and out of certain counties. Consequently, Kenyans have had to relook what they took as normal last year.
Today, many people have been rendered jobless; businesses have been shut; school children are home, and will continue being so for a while; and plans have been put on ice, if not cancelled altogether. However, one of the greatest attributes we possess as humans is adaptability: collectively, we always find ways to manoeuver through a crisis. For example, because public gatherings are still discouraged, some universities around the country have launched online learning approaches for their students, while some employers have allowed sections of their staff to work remotely. At KamiLimu, this change has meant that we have had to adjust our program to meet the new reality without adversely affecting the impact we hope to have in the lives of our mentees. So, how do you run a mentorship program in times of crisis? Or more specifically, how do we run KamiLimu during this ongoing pandemic?
First, we cancelled all in-person meetings. This decision was made following the government’s directive that banned all public gatherings in March. Plus, it was the only sensible course of action that could be taken to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. This move meant that we essentially put a stop to all KamiLimu sessions because our meetings, whether in the main program or between mentees and their peer or professional mentors, were mainly in-person. However, it would have been a great disservice to our mentees and partners to do so indefinitely, since, importantly, no one knows when things will get back to normal or what that new normal will look like. Thus, we shifted to a virtual learning scheme.
Making this decision was easy; however, selecting which modules to offer online was not a simple undertaking. KamiLimu has five main pillars that drive our activities: Innovation and ICT, Personal Development, Professional Development, Community Engagement, and Scholarship Awareness and Application. In turn, each of these components has various sub-modules. For instance, under Personal Development, we have Confidence Building, Mental Health, and Public Speaking subunits. Some of these sub-components are also interdependent, and, for that reason, there cannot be one without the other. For example, we cannot have any public speaking competitions before our facilitators — Titus Mutwiri, KamiLimu’s vice-chairperson, and Natalie Mukundane, one of our professional mentors and a distinguished public speaker — give their own demonstrations regarding how to effectively deliver a speech. Thus, we had to break down the entire program again to separate the sessions that we can cover online while suspending those that have to wait till we can meet in-person.
However, this uncoupling does not mean we have neglected other subunits in our curriculum. For instance, one way that we enhance the Public Speaking pillar is by challenging the mentees to practice effective presentation and communication skills using technology during their monthly peer and professional mentorship exercises. A case in point, we recently ran a task that required the mentees to express the impact that KamiLimu has so far had on them through appropriately-chosen media. We were glad to see incredible presentations that included faux interviews, written poems, articles, and visual essays. While this arrangement enables us to deliver part of our curriculum, it is far from ideal. Dr. Chao put it better in her email:
I understand entirely how lonesome and anxious the last three months have been. I know how difficult it is to remain excited about virtual mentorship meetings where you cannot hug someone, laugh about things, stay behind and chat, pop into my office, and meet a speaker in flesh and blood. I understand how overwhelming it is to remain passionate about your growth when it seems that the opportunities you had envisioned are taking on a virtual form — or no form at all. I fully understand the effect of the lack of physical interaction with your fellow mentees and your peer mentors. I remembered when last year, KamiLimu was given 15 free movie tickets during the Nairobi Film Festival, and most of us went to watch several movies together. I know how it feels to miss out on all these and more within your personal lives. I miss you and KamiLimu sessions more than I can express in this long letter.
Despite these challenges, still, we rise. We have tried to make our online sessions as captivating and as engaging as possible. We have, over the past two months, created games to drive teamwork within our peer mentorship groups. We play Kahoot! during our sessions, and we strive to support our mentees in every way that we possibly can. This combination of icebreakers, games, and support has helped us to build a culture of kindness and empathy; one in which we can be present as equals as we try to navigate these uncertain times. We also celebrate our triumphs, whether small or big, as any win is still a win. Finally, we hope. We hope that we get out of this situation soon, so that we can enjoy small talk and banter over breakfast and lunch, since as Thagana Kimaru, our alumnus, jokingly says, we also run a KamiLimu Feeding Program.
So, how do you sustain a mentorship program in times of crisis? For us at KamiLimu, it means constant planning, replanning, communicating effectively, and, most important of all, innovating.
