December 28, 2016

Professional development for the staff is part of the DNA of TFFT. The organization invests on its staff to ensure that we give only the best to the children we serve as well as our other boundary partners.

Last November 18-19th, Hedwiga Mchaki and I were given the opportunity by the organization to attend an international conference in Dar es Salaam. Dubbed “Breaking the Cycle” – this two-day conference, which brought together experts on child protection from 15 different countries, was co-hosted by Railway Children Africa and Fundacion JUCONI. These experts shared their knowledge and experience, drawing upon years of robust evidence base of research and practice, to show how we can better understand the impact of family violence and how we can build interventions to help people heal and help families create safer relationships in their homes.

While we only have a handful of children who were street-connected prior to joining the program, about half of our scholarship children came from orphanages and children centers. Some have undergone traumatic experiences due to either death of their parents or primary caregivers and abject poverty. And while not many experienced family violence, some have problems building emotional attachment with their real families after spending their growing up years in the orphanages. This is why the theme of the conference really made Hedwiga and me excited. We believed that the lessons from this conference would help us in helping our children and their guardians/families build positive and secure attachment.

The conference offered 24 workshops and keynote sessions and Hedwiga and I collectively attended 12 of them, by going to different workshops and carefully selecting those that resonates most to the work that TFFT does. I was particularly inspired with the Hero Book making workshop that I attended (of course, with my love for books and stories!) and would surely do this activity with our scholars next year. The hero book is a series of autobiographical storytelling and art exercises—the aim of which is to develop survivors, good citizens, and solution-finders. Just envisioning how these workshops with our kids would look like makes me really excited! I also learned about the Strengths-Based Approach (SBA) in therapeutic work with families affected by violence.  Of great interest to Hedwiga was one of the sessions she attended discussing the Guidelines on Children’s Reintegration, which were developed by leading aid and development agencies.

A two-day conference cannot provide us all the answers nor it can provide us all the tools that we can immediately apply to our work. However, this conference gifted us with insights and inspired ideas for how we might develop our work. It also helped us connect with organizations that can support us to strengthen TFFT’s work for the children and families we serve.

I look forward to writing about what we have done with the lessons this conference gave us next year!