As I mentioned before the past couple weeks was spent at a counterpart workshop in Maomou (Fouta), Pita (my future site), and Labé (my future regional capital).
The purpose of the workshop was to teach our counterparts, the person we will be working with for the next two years, what Peace Corps expects from them, what they should expect from us, and just provide an opportunity for us to hang out together. My counterpart, Menseur Barry, is great. He runs a successful café and is also the head of the CECOJE organization in Pita. He seemed genuinely enthusiastic about my arrival and was certainly patient with all of the questions I had about the organization and the city throughout my site visit. This should be a very good two years.
Pita is very urban in comparison to Dubreka. The daily market is very clean and organized, which is a nice change of pace. I also had the opportunity to stay in the apartment I’ll be living in during my service. It’s pretty spacious, with a great little awning in front, a dining room, two bedrooms, and my own pit-latrine in the back. I couldn’t be more thrilled about my living arrangement, especially because I thought I would be living in a hut before I got here. The best part is that I am set up for electricity whenever the city decides to turn it on. There is a Chinese hydroelectric dam that supplies the power called the Kinkon Dam (until I got there I thought everyone was saying the King Kong Dam).
Right now we are in the last full week of training. Still boggles my mind that I’ve been here for nearly two months now. Overall PST has been an interesting experience. I understand that it’s hard for Peace Corps to effectively meet the needs some of the trainees while not boring others since we differ so much in professional and language experience. This means, to be safe, we are inundated with technical and language courses. While they’re certainly informative they tend to drag on. Language is a particularly sore spot. 4 hours of every day are devoted to language training and for the people who have already interviewed out of their language requirement, 4 hours of class can be pretty boring. For the rest of us who still have to pass their interview next Wednesday, it’s still frustrating. After seeing how beneficial it is be completely immersed in French on site everything else seems kind of useless in comparison.
To Peace Corps’ credit, as much as we complain about how tedious the training schedule is it’s hard to argue with the results. My French has definitely come a long ways. This past week I gave a 30-minute presentation on a feasibility study I did with my small business partner here in Dubreka and this Tuesday I’ll give another 30-minute presentation with my small group to the CECOJE here in Dubreka discuss their strengths and weaknesses (or as Target would say, their Wins and Opps). I think the fact that I am procrastinating prepping for the presentation by writing this blog update actually reflects how much more comfortable I’ve become at speaking French. I don’t plan on winging it by any means, but I know at the beginning of training I would have been pouring over my notes and stressing out a lot more than I am now. Just finished the presentation and it went great. Woohoo.
Not to sound trite, but it is also very bittersweet now that PST is coming to a close. Many of us are getting sick of the 8 hours of training we have every day, but at the same time there are only two more weeks before G21 is split up for good. We all say we’ll visit each other once we get on site, but in all honestly we’ll be pretty busy with work. Also, to visit another region means an 8-10 hour drive for many of us. While that wouldn’t necessarily be a big deal in the states, in bush-taxi land not only is it extremely expensive and uncomfortable, it’s dangerous to boot. We’ll all see each other in 3 months for IST (In Service Training), but it won’t be the same. We all get along so well it will be hard to say goodbye to everyone.
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