Between August 11th and the 15th everyone in my training class met up in Dar for our MSC. On the way, I stopped at another volunteer's house with a handful of others to help send him off. He will be finishing his service in about a week and a half. He has been a good friend and mentor for me and many of us in our first year here and he will be missed, so we were happy to stop in and help him finish all his leftover bucket wine and cook some kababs!
There was cake too.
Back to MSC though...
The first couple days were dedicated to medical stuff. After over a year in country they want to make sure we are all still alive and well. We all got tested for TB.
Along with medical things, we all had a one on one meeting with staff to see how things are going, what we are up to, what challenges we're facing and how they can help more. Not a lot to report on that. My meeting was mostly about Shika stuff and how we can reach the biggest audience with the tools we are developing.
After all these appointments, we had a few days of more formal sessions. One of the more interesting ones was about development and foreign aid. We learned that of the entire federal budget of the USA, less than 1% is allocated to foreign aid. Of that, Peace Corps only accounts for a small percent. We learned that each volunteer only costs about $40,000 per year about 1/4 of the cost of the average aid worker. We also learned more about our roles here and how we fit into development as a whole. There are many organizations which help with development, but few (if any) have the kind of grass roots network that Peace Corps does. We live and work with rural village communities. We learn their culture and their language and integrate as much as we can. We can serve as the, often missing, connection between NGOs and the people they are trying to help. This session led easily into information on extension opportunities. Many volunteers extend with NGOs. The NGOs love us because we understand the culture and language better than most foreigners, and we volunteers love it because they often put us up in town in a nice house or apartment with electricity, running water, maybe a fridge...better phone/internet access. I can't say I'm convinced I'll be extending, but I think if the right opportunity arises, I would be open to the idea. We will see what happens.
Beyond that session, we had other sessions about safety (still no real threat of Ebola here, no al shabab outside of Kenya, just a big election year coming up to be slightly worried about depending on the region), resilience (staying sane for one more year), an RPCV (returned peace corps volunteer) panel, and our shift into what they like to call our "senior year" in country. There are four classes in country and we will soon be the ones who have been here the longest.
Finally there was a session they call "open space" where we choose topics that are relevant to us and we talk about things in smaller groups. You choose what groups you want to go to and you can bounce around to different ones throughout the time. I went to one about gathering relevant volunteer information (bus fares, good restaurants, maps of banking towns, friendly and cheap hotels...) into a database for the use of PCVs. Also I helped lead one about Shika na Mikono. We introduced new resources that we are developing and reintroduced old resources to volunteers in my class to remind them of what is available.
Other than that we had a lot of fun being back together for a week in Dar and re-energizing for the year ahead. That's MSC.
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