Training Team

Today three of our team left for Accra, Ghana and Nairobi, Kenya to train the technical coordinators who will be teaching the orientation sessions for our mobile phone pastor training course. These are most of the people who developed the training. It took a lot of work, but we expect it will pay off when we see the first wave of 2400 pastors-in-training start this course!

For those interested in the geeky details; each memory chip is a 16 Gb Class 10 microSD flash memory card, similar to the ones that come in nearly every new Android smartphone these days.

At the same time we are working on some minor last-minute bugs in the mobile phone training system. It seems that when you submit a quiz from one country to the “system” in another country the quiz answers get dropped. D’oh.

(I thought I’d start the new year by writing more about the smaller details that go into making a larger mobile phone pastor training course work.)

It looks like I probably won’t be going on this trip, as it will be during Cathy’s second week of chemo treatment.

Pastor Philip

I don’t usually post our prayer letters here. At one point I’m sure I had a reason why, but now that they get posted to Twitter and Facebook, I don’t see why not here, too.

Read Pastor Philips’s story..

Jerry Interviews a Mombasa Pastor

Actually none of the pastors we interviewed today were from Mombasa, but that was where we met them all. They took the final exam for the Institute of Christian Leadership course and told us about how their ministries changed as a result of the class and how they had grown spiritually through it.

Philip said he was so grateful for the class because he could not afford to pay for training at a seminary and couldn’t leave his ministry and family. He is a perfect example of why we developed this type of training.

Pastor Philip

And this is where we landed for the night; Mombasa Beach. No complaints. Back to Nairobi tomorrow.

Mombasa Beach

http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/-/539444/1169182/-/1232lbaz/-/index.html

My favorite music is African, and hearing it sung live is the best. I recorded this at a church gathering of pastors in Mombasa using my video camera, so the audio quality is terrible and the men are only visible halfway through the video. But the music is pure enjoyment.

An overview of what it’s all about.

Zarc Teaches a Group of Pastors

Class #2 of our mobile phone pastor training included a group from Mombasa, Kenya. While Mombasa is not exactly a remote location, having another cohort of pastors there allows us to learn how to run multiple classes in parallel.

Mombasa is like Orlando in the summer without air conditioning; warm and muggy. The culture was closer to Orlando, too; casual and relaxed. I didn’t have to wear my suit. The church in which we met had a dirt floor and a corrugated steel roof that was open to the sky in some parts. Fortunately there was an electrical outlet that kept our batteries charged long enough to register the new students.

Not only does the student learning application run on a mobile phone, but parts of the computerized learning system run on mobile phones as does the student administration program. Registering new students only requires access to the Internet on a smart phone.

Jerry with some of the pastors

As with the other groups that have started using this mobile phone training, this group learned how to use their new phones in a short time. Most of them had never used a touch screen device before, so they all had to learn new concepts. Eventually they all learned how to run the training application on their phones before we left.

Flying To Mombasa

We flew into Mombasa from Nairobi early in the morning, and we flew back to Nairobi in the afternoon. So I never got to see the coast of Kenya. What I saw of Mombasa looked the same as what I have seen of Nairobi. Maybe next trip to Kenya I’ll be able to spend some time in Mombasa on the coast, something every Kenyan tells me I should do.