Looking at 2024 in retrospect, I realize that I actually did great with one of the major goals I set – networking. Really though, I didn’t even have this written in any book or note as a goal I’d set for the year. It was just one of those things you decide subconsciously. I think I carried it over from 2023, where I was very intentional about it. In 2023, I wrote it down, and talked about it extensively even here on Hive. Interesting thing is, in the early weeks of 2023, little did I know of where this intention to network will lead me – on my journey of volunteering and impact: my work with Lead For Ghana. This post is not going to detail that though, it’s just going to touch on an account of the most recent thing I’ve volunteered on.
In the one year I’ve been here, I’ve lived a very isolated life, for a variety of reasons. Among others, it’s usually been out of concern for my safety and my very serious interest in staying out of trouble. But 2 weeks ago, a colleague of mine invited me to chair a quiz competition that was organized by the Roman Catholic Church of the town. I didn’t take him seriously when he asked, and jokily said yes, to find out a few days later he was actually serious.
Aside from the joy of volunteering (and my big reward that is waiting for me in heaven😂) I got to meet a lot of new peers and educators. You could say I even made a friend or two. Not really my idea of a networking session, but what can I say, you take what you get.
The quiz was between 8 Junior High Schools, and across 4 subjects: English, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, and The Life of St. John Boscos, an added theme the church wanted to assess the students on. As I'm sure you guessed, the life of St. John Boscos was a new for me. I'm sure the kids, who earlier told me multiple times how they admired how I spoke, must’ve been disappointed watching their rockstar fumble with simple names when we got to that round because boy did I murder those names! I had to consult the Christian Members on my panel to be able to pronounce them right. Somewhere into the middle of the round though, by some miracle, I got a hang of it and it was smooth sailing again.
My own secret admiration I didn’t tell the kids was that I was honestly impressed by their performance across the 4 subjects, because I teach their “Seniors” at the Senior High School level, and there seemed to have been some sort of mysterious knowledge gap between them and their seniors. If you know what I mean. But although I couldn’t explicitly say this directly, I in one way or the other, still got the message across that I was impressed.
The quiz reminded me a lot about the good ol’ high school days, especially the parts when one of the schools began chanting “The guy know book”, their math guru’s nickname as I called them to substitute another contestant right before the Math round.
If you’ve been to quiz competitions, especially in rural schools, you know from experience that quiz competitions sometimes end sour. This one almost did. You see, I had myself in a pickle because out of the 8 schools that were in the competition, 4 schools were in a tie (2 for runner up position, and the other 2 for first position) at the end of the competition, so I had to run extra rounds to get a winner.
After reading the last question to the tied schools for first position (which required they mention 2 things), the contestant that attempted the question was waiting to get a nod or some sort of sign to continue from me before mentioning the second thing, and their time elapsed before I gave this nod (which I wasn’t supposed to give). So after I declared the round lost, their teachers rushed to the table to have a word. Thankfully, we solved it in a matter of seconds and I addressed the crowd on what the issue was about.
I later learned from my friend that why the anticipated conflict was avoided was because of the transparency I applied in addressing every “confusion” that came up along the way in the quiz. But what they called “transparency” is simply a community ownership-inspiring technique I learned in preparation for my capstone project at the organization I currently work with, which basically makes it easier to get a community (in this case, the different schools at the competition) to work with you by making them feel involved in the process of whatever you’re doing, even if you’re leading that thing and your decision is what passes at the end of the day.
That day, I didn’t even realize that was what I did until it dawned on me days after the event during a casual shower thought zone out, but it was interesting seeing how the different things we learn can have such extendable applications.😂😂😂
All Images here except for the cover image are mine and were taken by me. The cover image was taken on a different phone, and is used with permission from the photo owner.
