Drew's time at Prevention in Action

Last Friday Amelia and I joined Kayla, Emily and Vernon in Kuyasa to help run a strategic planning workshop for Prevention in Action (PIA), an organization that works to end gender-based violence through outreach programs. Kayla and Emily have been working with PIA as interns for a few months and Amelia and I have both been part of a project that has raised money on PIA’s behalf to help create a safe office space for them to operate out of.

The goal of the strategic planning workshop was to help PIA better direct and plan in the future. We helped them develop a vision, mission statement, and taught them the hokey poky.  We held the session in a small church in Kuyasa that was just big enough to fit the roughly 60 people who showed up for the session. Vernon wanted as many community and organization members involved to make sure that the strategic planning helped maintain a strong connection and relationship between the community and PIA.

Vernon has a way of getting people very excited and energetic so soon the hall was full of energy and sporadically everyone would break out in song (I guess they were well known because everyone was singing along). As most of the people there spoke primarily isiXhosa, working with them was interesting at times especially as everyone was getting very engaged.

Before the session had started and before anyone had arrived I asked Emily if she needed help with anything. She told me to do the hokey pokey. So I did the hokey pokey. Kayla then joined me in the hokey pokey. We then asked Vernon if he had ever hokey pokeyed. He hadn’t so we taught him the hokey pokey.

Halfway through the morning right before we took a short break Vernon announced that the Americans would be teaching them all a dance right when we got back from the break. We mentally prepared ourselves to hokey pokey in front of 60 South Africans working to fight gender-based violence. Right before we were about to go up the entire hall began singing, in harmony, while clapping and stomping in rhythm. It was very impressive and an appropriate introduction to the pride of American song and dance, the hokey pokey.

We forced Vernon to join us up front in the hokey pokey as he had shown shocking progress with its complicated steps over the two minutes of practice earlier. After a few minutes of hokey pokeying (which the South Africans were shockingly good at and quickly showed up our American hokey pokey with a much less awkward interpretation) we were released and sat in shame in the back.

After hokey pokeying we continued with the work at hand which is far less entertaining to write about. Overall though it was a great day and PIA made great progress towards better strategic planning in the future and I am extremely proud to have been part of the process.