The Final
Last days of the social sabbatical
It’s unbelievable. It feels like yesterday when we arrived in Rwanda, but in reality the fourth week is almost over. Yesterday we had the final presentation with our clients, tomorrow is the closing event, and on Saturday most of us will leave Rwanda after four weeks of intensive work, great experiences, and many lessons learned.
This weak we focused mainly on the preparation of the final presentation, i.e., we summarized our findings, tried to find a way to present them, and discussed last details. It’s fascinating how much you can achieve in four weeks with a team of only three people who are not real experts for the requested tasks. When we first met with our client virtually more than four weeks ago, I couldn’t imagine how the results of this assignment will look. I also had many doubts of I can really contribute something substantial to the deliverables. I never did things like marketing and PR, but luckily Liz and robin_meyerhoff have more experiences in those areas. And, during our first week or turned out that the challenges for Starlight are not only the PR and marketing stuff but also what they shall market, hence what is their vision and mission and what are their offerings they want to sell. And, surprisingly, during that phase of our work I could really contribute something. Using some technics from design thinking, we could shape the vision and mission and could get more clarity of the offerings, existing ones, new ones, short term and long term ones. Although I’m not an expert in design thinking (but maybe I should become one?) I had at least some experience with it and could facilitate our design thinking sessions. And, I think, we can be happy with the results. Starlight now has more clarity how they should position themselves, what they can offer and when. Based on that we built also a growth plan and have some recommendations for potential partners and funders and other business fundamentals. And as the cherry on the cake we could also deliver the recommendations for communications and marketing and the guidelines for social media which were the main topics of the original scope of work.
All this we presented yesterday to Ariane and Alice and they seemed to be nex happy work the results. But that’s only the beginning of a long journey. Now they have to implement our recommendations, refine the results, especially the financials, find partners and customers and deliver the trainings. All of that will mean a lot of work for them. And not everything will work as planned, but hopefully they can say in a few years that our social sabbatical with the starting point of a new era of their success. And that’s a wish to them not because it would appreciate our work but because they are two such powerful and inspiring women with a lot of ideas how they can make the world a little bit better and therefore deserve success.
But before we resumed work on Monday, we had a wonderful weekend at lake Kivu. It was the first time for me to leave Kigali and see a little bit more of the country. Now, I can completely understand why Rwanda is called “the land of the thousand hills”. There are literally thousand hills and everything is so green. We saw tea and banana plantations, fields with maize and sugar cane, and meadows with cattle and goats on our way to Gisenyi. Gisenyi is directly at lake Kivu and, even if Gisenyi as such is not so interesting, lake Kivu is a lovely place. It seems to be the favorite place for weddings, at least we saw a couple of them during our stay there.
After lunch we did a boat trip which started wonderful. We could see a lot of fishing boats, beautiful, small islands, and hot springs. But the end of the trip was a little bit scary, because on our return it became dark (and the boats didn’t have light) and a thunderstorm was approaching. But luckily, we found our way back, no other boat hit us, and even the lightnings remained far away.
Sunday morning everyone did what they want, I went for a run before breakfast and after breakfast I did a small walk with some others from our group on the lakeside. But unfortunately it began to rain after some time and we decided to go back to Kigali, which was a 5 hour trip.
