1: I learned how to grow oyster mushrooms in Sierra Leone!

I learned that everyone we work has their own unique stories and divulging in them can help improve cross cultural understanding and build lasting relationships.

I learned to be more optimistic. I will never succeed in anything if I think I’ll fail before I even start. That comes from my own project but also from observing the other projects and their team members interactions with each other.

2: I learned a lot about the skill of negotiating by practicing such often in the market. It was often easier to negotiate if I made my attempts at a lower price in a less serious manner. In laughing with the vendors about how absurd their overcharge of me was I got lower prices than last year despite the overall rise in prices

My decision making had always been pretty indecisive, but in taking a leadership role this year I realized that I had to make a decision and actually enforce it. Even with Jawara, I think it was helpful to often take the approach of being friends, but when I needed him to do something, I changed my tone so that he knew I was talking as his boss.

If there is one main difference between Krio and English it is the length and specificity of sentences. I often found that the longer I spoke the less people seemed to understand or want to listen. I think giving shorter instructions lead to greater success in communication. Having to think about communication this carefully definitely helped me to improve my communication skills.

3: While I am usually open to trying new things, I have never really been an initiator of it. Even though I had already been to Sierra Leone, many of the things we still had to do were new and uncomfortable. I think I got much better at initiating something that I might not be in fact fully comfortable with. It is the only way to keep growing as a person.

Over the semester we talked a lot about improvisation and expecting things to go wrong. Our project especially is very materials oriented, which can be a huge problem considering few if any of the resources we had is the USA are available in Sierra Leone. At mountaintop we also talked to a Matt Sicher about his mushroom farm and how you can adapt a wide variety of materials to suit your needs. We applied this exactly in every aspect of the project

I learned a lot about putting trust in other people and yourself/what you know. In the last week I was pessimistic about us getting mushrooms even though I knew we did exactly what we were trying to do in terms of processes and that enough time had not passed. Belle however was optimistic that we would be successful.