AISA Conference

From October 16th to October 19th, the AISA Conferences (Association of International Schools in Africa) were held at the International School of Kenya. Teachers from all over Africa come to these conferences to attend seminars that they find interesting or that they believe they can learn from to become better at their jobs. In order for these teachers to choose seminars and register for them, they need to talk to the secretariats, and in this case, the secretariats were 10 ISK students, one of which was me.

On October 16th, the first day of the conferences, we were responsible for setting up the secretariats' area and organizing our work space. This included connecting laptops to the AISA server and finding out all about the seminars so that we could advise teachers on which ones to attend. After this, the registering began. Teachers would come to us with questions about the seminars and after deciding which ones they wanted to attend, we would register them. Later, we were each assigned to one classroom/ seminar and were responsible for signing people in as they came. This job was actually quite difficult as some teachers refused to follow rules and all we could do as student was try to persuade them to listen to us. Although we were given permission to stand up to the teachers if they were not following rules, most of us did not do this because we were afraid of being rude! Our final job was to help the presenters of the seminars and make sure that everything was good to go before the seminar began. We often delivered water bottles to teachers and once or twice, we were even asked to bring them coffee!
The next three days were basically organized in the same way and the ISK students had the same responsibilities. The last day of the conference was a bit more hectic as we were each given two seminars to watch over, and there was a lot of going back and forth to make sure that everyone was satisfied and that everything was running they way it should have. Before the conference was over, Dr. Roberts, the ISK Director, thanked all of the ISK students for the work they had done and for "giving up" half of their October break to help out. He presented each of us with a certificate of appreciation and the conference was over.

I truly enjoyed helping out at AISA. I had never done anything quite like this before and it was a completely new experience for me. I never thought that I would enjoy being someone's "assistant" for such a long time but it proved to be very fun. Not only did I feel like I had done something useful with my October break, but I also felt as though I had learned something new and I now understand how much planning goes into holding an event as big as this. I look forward to possibly helping out at AISA conferences again next year if they are held in Kenya!