Update: Technical In-Service Training

So our 1st 3 months at site are complete! This means the period of time where our travel is restricted and we are told not to do projects  is over! However, as we have explained, we have been busy greeting, integrating, and working on mini-projects (world map mural & garden). In fact, you can see the progress made on our mini-projects below:

 

   

(Joye is basically finished painting the World Map, with the exception of the Malian flag in the corner and will label the countries in French when she returns to village)

Additionally, we have been busy pushing paper for Peace Corps. Before coming to our December Technical In-Service Training (IST), we were required to conduct sector-appropriate needs assessments and complete 10 household food security surveys.  While challenging, this paperwork helped us to gain a comprehensive understanding of our villages needs, wants, and capabilities. For example, in Joye’s needs assessment, she learned that Kongodugu (the pseudonym for our village) wants to build a middle school, but needs an additional teacher, increased enrollment, and a well-functioning school board first. Similarly, James came to know many organizations in Suguba (the pseudonym for where he works) while interviewing people for the food security surveys, including a trash-pickup enterprise, a chicken-raising association, an NGO that works with biofuels, and a widow’s association that give out microloans to its members. So now we can say with confidence that we have a baseline understanding of our villages, which is critical to implementing sustainable work.

 

So now we’re back at Peace Corps summer camp for 2 weeks of technical sector specific training: so that’s Education for Joye and Environment for James. We’ll be learning things like how to train a village school board, how to start and/or manage a literacy center, school health activities and learning games, how to raise chickens, farm fish, graft trees, project planning, proposal writing, and how to get funding. So we’ll be busy! Hopefully, it’s not difficult to see how these trainings will enable us to address some of issues in our villages; this makes the sessions more interesting than they should be. Its also really nice to get back together with other volunteers to see how they creatively handled similar challenges at site.

 

Once we return to site, our next step will be meeting with community leaders to share the results of our baseline surveys, formally identify community development priorities, and start planning projects. These things inevitably will take much longer than they would in the States, but we’re already excited and anxious about commencing our work.

 

~James and Joye