Reorientation: Welcome Back To Your Job!

Being a fully fledged Peace Corps Volunteer is no gradual process in any sense of the word. After the abrupt conclusion of the first term of school, myself and 19 others in my 2008 class launched into an intense 10 days of training at the College of Forestry in Dedza. We were stuffed with 5 carb-heavy meals per day, loaded up with development and teaching resource books and photocopies enough to fill a binder, pampered by hot running water and (semi)functioning flush toilets, and embraced by our homestay host families from pre-service training, whom we paid visits to while around the college. We got vaccinations, free meds, hugs, and quickie consultations from the medical staff, a language refresher course where I got to flaunt my fluency (seriously, I'm the head girl in the Chichewa group, vying with another guy for top dog) and ask obscure picky grammar questions of our trainers, and a cultural field trip to Mua Mission - including the zoo and shopping. Some of the most useful information/work sessions were those concerning secondary projects and related funding proposals. This is how the real community development work gets done, and it's nice to finally know some of the nuts and bolts so we can get rolling.

(Kungoni cultural center at Mua)

My group of 20 also got started on an education sector-specific, 2 week long summer camp project for gifted community day secondary school students called Camp Sky. Four of the organizers from last year came to share with us some general info about their approach to the camp, challenges they ran into, and to act as resource people while we had the first few meetings. I chose to get involved with one of the most important groups, the curriculum committee. Our job is to recruit and organize the people and the content of the classes/sessions, basically the focus of the camp. PCVs from education as well as health and environment sectors get involved in teaching a dynamic set of classes that will prepare the kids for subject material important to their national exams as well as to prepare them to be creative and resourceful in carving out a future for themselves in any setting. Business sense and ambition is going to be a big element of all the fun activities we're dreaming of: knitting and baking classes will place those skills in the context of a business model, composting will be compared with fertilizer in terms of cost and efficacy, students will practice mock interviews, etc.

I'm super excited to work on Camp Sky, and it's something I've immediately grasped and gotten to work on. This project much more easily resembles the project frameworks of things I've done in community service and academic settings in the past, so it's an easy way to be productive. I'm grateful to PCVs before me who established such a facile model for educational enrichment - something volunteers and kids can love. I can't wait to see how it all comes together and how we come together as a PC community. The next big tasks for the group as a whole are to determine location, find money to fund it, and figure out what our specific content will be. I will most definitely be contacting folks back home for donations for this worthy project, so here's a heads up.

(Girls at the Ambassador's House/Estate)

In Dedza, my group also elected our various representatives in internal Peace Corps organizations. There main ones are the Volunteer Advisory Committee (like student government), Gender and Development, and Volunteers Supporting Volunteers (like peer counselors). I wanted to be involved in any/all, because I like to sit around at meetings and discuss, but in such a group of people we were ALL coveting positions of responsibility, so it was too tough competition for me to win any of the seats. Call it a popularity contest, I'm still a shy girl in group settings.

Such an intense period - and all of it happened while thrown back together with people who have been doing their own thing for three months, including making new friends at all our specific regions of the country. Most of the groups of friends that were established before were maintained, but due to some shifting of our group - including the loss of two outgoing girls, there was a lot more friendly inter-mixing and varied conversation. Most of us felt recharged and refocused afterwards. We are now a lot more ready and excited to go back and implement some of the Income Generating Activities we've heard about. Some of my fellow volunteers are ahead of the curve, and are already completing funding requests for projects they've got their communities excited about - a girls' camp, a guinea fowl raising project, and teacher trainings are a few examples.

I was more than ready to head off to the beach for some rest and relaxation with the girls after that marathon. See next entry for details..