My much needed one week holiday vacation to take a mental break from site (and Peace Corps in general) turned into three weeks dedicated almost entirely to training the new training class that just transferred from Niger. So much for the mental break! I still got to take my Christmas trip to Ambato with some other volunteers but my plans to spend New Year’s on relaxing on the beach in Foulpointe quickly got thrown out the window when Peace Corps called me two days before Christmas to say, “We hope we caught you before you left site (they didn’t). We would like you to come in to train for two weeks after Christmas. You don’t have to commit to the full two weeks (actually, you kind of do) but we really think the trainees need the support of volunteers because they still have not met any PCVs in Madagascar. Oh, and we’d like you here on the 27th.” Well, I couldn’t very well say no to providing support to a bunch of trainees who had just lived through consolidation and evacuation from Niger and were now being forced to start back at square one with a new country, a new language and new jobs. So I ran back to site, grabbed a few warm clothes for the cold Lake Mantasoa weather at the Peace Corps Training Center and said goodbye to my chance to relax.
I knew when I signed up to reinstate that a large part of my responsibilities would be to help get the program started again, i.e. training. And I had been excited about the opportunity to help restart and reform Peace Corps Madagascar. So the fact that I had to train this new group didn’t bother me – in fact, I was excited to meet them. The timing, however, was pretty unfortunate as was the chaotic, last minute nature of the request. This was made especially frustrating since I had spoken to Peace Corps several times about when and if they needed me to train and had gone ahead and planned my vacation since I had been unable to get any information aside from being told I would be needed some time in January and definitely not for more than a week. This is Peace Corps though, and organization and communication have never been among Peace Corps strengths.
I am excited for this new group of volunteers. Overall, they seem like a really good group. They’ve handled the evacuation and transition to Madagascar surprisingly well. I’ve lived through Peace Corps training and evacuation if I had to go through both at the same time I don’t think I’d be in nearly as good of shape as this group.
The question of whether taking this training class from Niger was a good move for PC Madagascar is still up for debate. On the one hand, having an extra training class, especially one with volunteers in each of the four sectors, will do wonders for getting PC Madagascar back up to where it was to before evacuation. Also, keeping the training class together in the transfer is great for their group. This way, they get to go through this incredibly trying time together and have each other as a support network as opposed to getting farmed off to different countries and having to go through transferring/training alone. On the other hand, Peace Corps barely seemed ready for our tiny group of reinstatees when we arrived in country and I’m afraid that taking on such a large training class so suddenly is going to start a vicious cycle of disorganization. Instead of being able to take time to develop really good sites for the next training class and provide good support for the volunteers that are already in country, they were scrambling to get enough sites ready in time for the group from Niger and now they will have to scramble again to get sites for the training class due to arrive in March. Finding appropriate sites and matching appropriate volunteers with those sites has always been a difficult issue and probably always will be. However, I had hoped that by starting off with a small number of volunteers they would have the time to devote to site development that they didn’t when there were 120+ volunteers in country and that maybe by starting off on the right foot that some of the issues with finding sites would be eased. At the same time, starting off small would not have guaranteed that there would have been any more organization once the program got back up to full capacity so in the end, it may not make a difference and more places in Madagascar will have a Peace Corps Volunteer, which is a good thing.
Either way, after having met and worked with the group from Niger, I am positive that they will all be great volunteers once they make it to site and I’m excited to see the kind of work they all end up doing.
And finally: Happy Holidays Everyone! Here's to hoping 2010 is a little less rocky for Madagascar...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment