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If there’s something in life worth doing, it’s worth over doing.

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Workshops in Tanzania

4 hours of sleep on Sunday, two nights, 3 days later with a 17 hours trip in Cairo washing my pant leg clean from horse dung, I found myself in a car screeching to a halt in the gridlock that was Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania having not slept since that Sunday. Another two days I get the full report of what I was doing.

In short, I am “to help the students find problems in the community and fix them” Said Stella, the regional director for YCI, the NGO I’m working with.

Or more indepth, I am to support Emerging Leaders (project) to link the problems identified during community mapping visits into project identification techniques and support Emerging Leaders to organize their ideas of  the problems identified in designing a project, and  discuss with them tips on project implementation, monitoring and evaluation. In more academia terms, increase the capacity of the community by strengthening their self-efficacy.


I gave a blank stare to Stella.

The youth have already gone through several months of skills development including leadership skills, community mapping, and other skills development, with other volunteers previous. Then I come in to finish up the curriculum by having them finally carry out their task by approaching community leaders, partnerships, other NGO’s and community members. This is daunting.

“So, this sounds like something I should be already an expert in!” I cried. My heart sunk as I have no training in this field!

As I start to learn more about what needs to be done and what the youth need to develop, the more my confidence began to grow. There are things I haven’t done before, like train a group of youth to ask for funding. I haven’t even done that! My fundraiser isn’t going so well, I think I have a lot to learn from them about that!

But then there are things I’ve done, such as giving classes. English classes. But this time the theme is proposal writing for funding and grants. Computer classes on how to turn on the machine and turn on a word processor. Life skills that we otherwise overlook in our daily lives.

All these projects are recommended by the UN Millennium Development Goals, given to Canadian Development Agency to different NGO’s to achieve goals by 2015.

Well, sink or swim time! Roll up my sleeves and dive in. This will be the funnest project I have given myself since scaling a mountain in Nepal. This is what I set out to do, it’s time to do it.

One of my more favourite quotes that I’ve been reciting these days:
“If there’s something in life worth doing, it’s worth over doing”

Western China dim sum

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Dim Sum!

Considering Korea is so close to China, you’d expect it to have some amazing Chinese food. This is entirely not the case.

Since Ian arrived, he’s been scouring the corners of Seoul to find a decent Chinese restaurant that serves dim sum. The most recent expedition brought Explorations to a place called Western China restaurant. It prided itself with dim sum and that’s what sold us to try it out, finally.

We ordered a chicken dish that seemed Asiatic in flavour, a noodle dish, and four dim sum dishes.We should also note, this was dim sum a-la-carte; and we don’t mean the usual push around carts that defined Ian’s childhood of dim sum meal times.You had to order it from the menu.

We’ll skip the other dishes as dim sum was the heart of the course for tonight. The dim sum dishes we had were Har Gaow, Siu Mao, Siu Long Bao, and Law Mai Fahn. Hovering at around 5,000 Korean won a piece or approximately 4.50(USD). Your usual dishes came with 3 pieces. Usually it’s 4 pieces an order elsewhere.
First, Har Gaow. This dish is one of the staple dim sum foods. You can tell the skill of the chef, and subsequently the quality of the restaurant by this dish. It was incredibly underwhelming. You could barely taste the shrimp, let alone the other spices that’s supposed to go with it.

Next, Siu Mai. Also one of the staple dim sum foods. Sure, there was pork and a little garnish of roe on top, but the shrimp was missing and most other spices that go into making this piece. Things are looking very grave for the next few dishes.

Along came Siu Long Bao. Ian’s first time trying this dim sum piece was, actually, in Korea. It was on par with the other dim sum retaurants he’s tried. but, we’re not entirely sure how good this is. This one is a dumpling with soup inside the dumpling. There’s promise that it could go well, but not here.

Last but not least was the Law Mai Fahn. This dish comes pre-wrapped in lotus leaf as it’s steamed in it. Inside the lotus leaf is sticky rice and in the middle of it, a concoction of chicken blend of spices. This was the closest tasting dish to what dim sum actually is. But having said that, it was still lacking in most flavours that define what this dish is. The sticky rice also wasn’t very sticky.

All in all at the end of the meal, we were full. The flavours of dim sum were less than impressive and even more so, a bill to rub salt in the wound really doesn’t justify the cost vs. taste ratio. First and last time we’ll ever go there.

The quest for dim sum continues…

We have Pictures of the other dishes. If you so chose to go to this restaurant, it’s in Itaewon in Hannam-Dong. The website and phone number is in the pictures, however we don’t reccommend destroying your hope of dim sum by going here. Good for Korean-ized Chinese food.