MEDA Staff Retreat in rural Pennsylvania

Friday and Saturday of last week I was in an international training event hosted by USAID and my employer, MEDA. The training covered something called “Business Design Services” that is the preferred method of international community economic development used by the US and Canada. The trainees were mostly MEDA staff working in Peru: Lima, Maputo, and Tarapoto; Managua, Nicaragua; Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania; Mozambique;Khajand, Tazjikstan [former Soviet Union republic]; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Waterloo, Canada; Haiti; and Los Angeles, California. Some staff from Haiti were unable to come to the training because of the threat of civil unrest in Haiti that escalated to Haiti’s President Arristide fleeing the country on Sunday, February 29. This two-day training event was held in a hotel in Manheim, Pennsylvania (near Lancaster).

Sunday, the group moved to a retreat center outside Lebanon, PA for an all MEDA staff retreat that occurs about every three years. The group is double the size of the training that I just came from and consists of approximately one third of the 150 or so people working on staff for MEDA world-wide. This event ends mid-day Wednesday. So far the agenda has focused on team building kinds of group exercises. The experience is somewhat less goofy that the AmeriCorps*VISTA supervisor training that I was coerced to attend in 2000. The group overall is an eclectic, multi-national, multilingual mix of youthful, energetic, intelligent, overachieving folks that make this an energizing experience that will be memorable.  

MEDA’s international headquarters is in Canada. I will guess that over half of the staff here is Canadian. Hockey anyone? The big deal for everyone is that it is so unseasonably warm here at 15 degrees C. [That’s almost 60 F for us Americans.]