Not one way to do everything

On my recent rural placement one of my projects was to organise and run a class on physical activity and exercise for aboriginal women for the local community centre. My supervisor gave me a lot of readings to do on understanding aboriginal culture to use for organising the class. Although I felt that I had gained some valuable information on aboriginal culture, I didn't think that it provided me with any information on how to run the class, i.e. what activities to do, how to make them relevant, how much exercise to do in the class compared to education etc...
As the class had not been run before my supervisor could not give me any information on who would be at the class or how many people we would be expecting. So I employed my usual tactic of being REALLY prepared. I organised a running sheet of what i would talk about and what activities i would do and prepared a handout to give to each of the ladies. I also prepared equipment, like a radio, balls and theraband.
Once we started the class, however, I realised that presenting the class as i had planned was not going to be well received by the small number of women who showed up. Their body language showed that they were not interested in what i had to say and they were less than enthusiastic in doing the exercises, which needed to be quite easy due to the large age range of the participants.
Although I struggled along for a while, I ended up discarding my lesson plan and starting a discussion with the women about what they thought about exercise, what exercise they did and what exercise they would like to be doing. This ended up being extremely valuable and we had a discussion for about 45 minutes. From this discussion we were able to get some solid ideas of what the women in the local community would like to be doing in terms of exercise and were even able to draft up an idea for a women's only exercise class to be run in the community.
From this experience I learnt that no matter how organised you are, you need to be flexible when dealing with people from other cultural backgrounds. The women were not interested in my talk (most of which they already knew) but instead wanted to organise some structured activities to maintain their fitness. I learnt that in a rural setting it is EXTREMELY important to be flexible and I definitely discovered the benifits of a good "yarn".