One Year Anniversary

Hard to believe, but I have now official been a Peace Corps Volunteer for one full year. I swore in on September 2, 2012 and have been on a wild ride ever since. That is probably a bit of an exaggeration. There are have been ups and downs for sure, but for the most part it has been as expected and has been a great experience. And with less than a year to go, I feel like I have a lot to do in a short amount of time.

No one but me remembered this day as an anniversary, but oddly enough, a bunch of rather incredible things happened that made me think that everyone was secretly celebrating the occasion. I was not at site this past week, as I was spent the last week of August at the Pre-Service Training (PST) for the Education Volunteers that arrived in mid-July (more about that in a minute.) I sort of figured that all of the projects that I had left behind at school would be in ruins upon my return, so I spent the whole walk to school this morning preparing myself to smile and keep calm when I realized that it would take two weeks to get everything back in order. I was so distracted by my own concerns, that I didn’t even notice that in celebration of the first day of spring and/or summer (I wasn’t really sure) none of the kids were wearing their uniforms. Not to mention, that as I was wearing my winter coat, it seemed like an odd day to celebrate the weather warming up.

In any case, I asked my counterpart to be in charge of organizing the Reader of the Day program for the week I was away and the week I was back and I simply assumed that no one would read all week because she would have dropped the ball. Totally wrong! A grade 4 learner was ready to read on Monday morning and there weren’t any problems the rest of the week. After morning assembly, as I made my way to class, the teacher that watched over the grade 5 class during maths time presented me with a completed stack of packets from the previous week. As I glanced through the work I also noticed that a lot of it was correct. Now this probably meant that he had helped a few of them and they had spread the correct answers around, but I’d much rather have the right answers spread around than the wrong ones. Another nice surprise! Finally, before I traveled to PST, I asked the school cleaner and the grade 7 teacher to keep the school store open before school so that the kids still had access to pens and pencils (and so we would keep raising money). After I finished teaching this morning, the school cleaner came to me with just a few leftover pens and more or less the right amount of money based on what was sold. All of these good things sort of made me wonder if I was in the twilight zone! Or if it was a one-year anniversary miracle! I wasn’t even all that annoyed that the computer lab had been cleaned in such a way that nearly everything was unplugged. I just took a bit of time before the second break to plug in the nine computers that I know could be turned on at the same time and left the rest. It was such a good day that I stayed with the grade 6 learners after school for Computer Club and then headed home to get my laundry started. Perhaps not the most glamorous celebration, but one that made me feel as if my first year of work here was starting to make a difference. I couldn’t ask for anything more than that.

Welcome SA28! The PCSA Education Volunteers
serving from July 2013 to September 2015.

It was a nice to be away for the week at PST, as well, although a bit crazy to think that the next group is here and almost ready to swear-in. Before they know it, they will be celebrating their one year anniversary and I will be gone! For their training, two or three current volunteers were invited to be part of the training each week. Peace Corps rented a rather lovely house in what can only be described as a snobby, gated community for us to stay in during the week. Did I mention the house had electricity and way better network coverage than my village? I certainly wasn’t going to complain about that. Our days started around 9:30am, we were driven around everywhere we needed or wanted to go, and got home about 4:30pm. Side note: I nailed the sessions I presented on grammar, vocabulary, and starting a school library ;-) We did have to cook and clean for ourselves, but somehow we managed. And we even got to make cookies a couple of times. It worked out perfectly. Best (and pretty sure only) paid vacation of my life. Definitely going to apply again next year. I better keep practicing my English grammar and vocabulary ;-)