NYSC

We are in a village about one hour drive away from Ilorin. There are more than 2.000 young Nigerians, all dressed in a white shirt, white shorts, white shoes and white socks with two green lines (the Nigerian flag!). These 2.000 people are the new group of the National Youth Service Corps. In Kwara state (where I am working) there are three batches a year. They are placed in different projects in the state and will serve for a year. The start of this year is a three week camp in this village.

We recruited here twenty new National Volunteers. Until now, the Graduate Volunteer Programme in which I work was only open for people who finished their year in the NYSC. But now we could recruit and select twenty people who can participate during their service year.
I am happy that we managed to recruit twenty young and enthusiast people who will be placed in schools in the rural areas to teach. They will get the chance to do small projects in their communities and will receive training. The first training is already given in the camp. I was very impressed by two young Nigerians who delivered a training on teaching skills. They have been in the programme for two years and did a great job in this training. Everybody participated very well and was very excited after the day. So I am very much looking forward to working with them again.

The newly recruited volunteers

I have been out for a few days, but I did get a tour through Ilorin last weekend from my housemates Stacey and Aswini. Ilorin is a big city (for Dutch standards at least) but also pretty quiet. My house is nice and quite spacious. The electricity is not always very reliable, (as expected). Our guard dog (Strong) is very funny but needs some training. The poor dog will be multilingual I think as I try to teach her Dutch, Stacey teaches her English and the guard speaks Yoruba to her I think. But so far she seems to listen to none of us, so no matter which language you use.

The neighbourhood is nice and the kids are extremely excited that there is even one more white person. Every time I get home all the kids are shouting and cheering and I get walked home by a lot of kids. As Stacey said; they are our daily Prozac dose, they are so happy to see us that you lose your bad mood immediately.


Next week I will be in Abuja for the In Country Training. After that, I will deliver training on project management and then I expect that everything really starts running. It seems like there is a lot to do and I am really looking forward to work with the National Volunteers.



My room

 

Our house