In-Service Training

 At the end of November we were finally able to leave site and head back into society for two weeks of in-service training. You better believe that all I wanted to do was take about a million showers and eat some food that I didn’t have to cook on my two burner hot plate. While that did happen, I also had to attend about eight hours of training each day, which was not all that exciting at times. A large part of the training was focused toward our school and community counterparts that were to accompany us for specific parts of the training sessions. The first few days were to be spent with our principals, then a few days with a teacher, then a few days with our HIV/AIDS education counterpart, and finally a few days with just our fellow volunteers.

Of course all of my counterparts had been informed weeks in advance about the dates and times that they needed to be at the different venues, but here it is apparently socially acceptable to have a change of plans the day before a prepaid event. Like my Thanksgiving experience, my principal decided the day before we were to leave for the principal’s workshop that he “just didn’t want to go”. Not only was I now out of a ride to the hotel that was two hours away, but the whole point of the workshop was to have the volunteers and the principals together to discuss issues the volunteers were having, and to sit down and plan the first term of school. However, that obviously wasn’t high on my principal’s priority list, so he had made arrangements earlier in the week to send the head of the department instead. Of course no one could tell me this until the day before, so I spent most of the time I was supposed to be packing on the phone with Peace Corps staff trying to figure out how to change reservations. To say I was pissed would be a huge understatement!

My mood drastically increased when we finally made it to the hotel the next day and I realized we were basically staying on the beach in the nicest three bedroom flats that I had ever seen, and we were right next to a real coffee shop. Score!!! Three vanilla lattes later, I was prepared to hang out with people who spoke fluent English, and who understood the struggles of transitioning to a village life. The stories that first night were epic. In some villages people were being stabbed, other schools had teachers that would leave in the middle of the day and never come back. Basically we decided that nothing in South Africa made any sense, and all of us were dealing with the same crap in a different village. Surprisingly this made me feel a lot better, and a lot less alone. However, I did learn that I was the only one at the workshop who didn’t have their principal, which made me feel a little awkward. Fortunately we all spent as little time with our supervisors as possible, so that worked in my favor.

After day one it became very apparent that our counterparts were not used to nine hour work days. We were usually in sessions starting at 8am and went until 3pm or 4pm with an hour break for lunch. There were also two 30 minute tea breaks throughout the day, so compared to an American work schedule it wasn’t that bad. However, you could slowly see the teachers start to fall asleep around 10am. Once the majority of the counterparts were asleep it was lunch time, and after lunch many of them seemed to disappear altogether. It was crazy. You could tell that many of them saw this as an opportunity to go to a nice hotel for a few days and enjoy some free food and place to stay. Unfortunately this made both the volunteers and the session leaders extremely angry, but what are you going to do?

For the most part the sessions were about different projects that we can do in our villages. We had sessions on Grassroot Soccer that combines soccer skills with HIV education, which I am planning on doing in my village. We also had sessions that pertained to the areas that we will be teaching in less than a month. Since I am focusing on teaching math I was able to attend sessions on things like how to teach fractions (something that kids here really struggle with), how to start mathletes, and how to use soccer (Africa’s favorite sport) to teach basic math skills. Those sessions were all very helpful and a valuable use of our time. Then there were the sessions on harassment and corporal punishment. These sessions were extremely stressful to sit through with our counterparts. For the most part they would just laugh at us when we talked about why sexual harassment and corporal punishment bothered us. When we discussed different ways to discipline kids the teachers would just shake their heads and act like they weren’t listening. When the female volunteers, including myself, talked about the issues we are having with sexual harassment even in our schools counterparts would make comments about how we just needed to deal with it, and that there was nothing they could do to help us. These sessions seemed to just make everyone mad and extremely annoyed, which seemed to make for good conversation once the volunteers were alone without the counterparts.

Overall it was just nice to be able to have some time with Americans, and to complain to people that could really understand what we are going through in our villages and school. To be honest we spent most of the time bitching about things that we have no control over, but that make our service harder. After three months at site it was very therapeutic to have a two week bitch fest!