On Fridays over the next several weeks, I am describing experiences from my service in the U.S. Peace Corps. An overnight flight from New York's JFK airport on Air Afrique put us in Dakar, Senegal the next day. In June, when the rains had still not come, Senegal was a very dry and very hot and very sandy place. Peace Corps staff met us just off the plane and we glided through immigration. In the baggage claim area we awaited our lives packed in the two allowed bags to catch up with us and sweated still in a bit of a daze from the long flight and little sleep. We boarded a bus waiting for us that took us to the training center in Thies, a city about an hour's drive from Dakar.
As one of the oddities at the time, Peace Corps Guinea did not train its volunteers in its own country, but utilzed a regional training center in Thies, Senegal. Now, all Peace Corps organizations that I am aware of train in their countries of service including Guinea. While, it was interesting to see another country in such depth, it would have been better to train where we were going to serve due to the languages, cultural traditions, and other unique things.
As our bus arrived at the training center, staff and volunteers put on an African drumming demonstration, snapped some pictures to compare our "just-off-the-boat" look to our later "international-street-wise" look, and welcomed us to our new temporary home. The training center was composed of a portion of buildings from an old French Colonial military barracks that had been converted to various purposes including classrooms and so on.
After the first day or two to let the jet lag wear off when we lived at the training center, we were divided up and individually sent to live with host families across the city of Thies. I was assigned to live with the family of Charles N'Dione, a police officer, member of the Wolof ethnic group, and a Catholic. He and his family were fairly well educated compared to the average and all including the women spoke good French.
After a first couple days of training in Wolof to better navigate our way around the city of Thies and communicate with our host families, we started our Guinea specific training in earnest. The training center was declared an immersion zone where we were not supposed to be speaking English except at certain times or places only French. For those of us (most) who were not sufficiently fluent in French, we studied French for six hours most days in groups of 3 or 4 with a Senegalese instructor in a small thatch roof hut at the training center. We were in training six days per week, all except Sunday.
The sand and heat and heat and sand dominated our lives for the first couple months. The rains were late in Senegal that year, meaning that not until the end of training did we begin to see thunderstorms and the greening of the city. With no air conditioning in any of the buildings we worked in or homes we lived in the heat was a constant force like inertia affecting every activity. Two showers a day were common, and a slower pace of life almost required. We adapted, but not without struggle.
About a half-dozen days into our training, we experienced our first Early Termination, or ET in Peace Corps parlance. Volunteers who accept their invitations sign a pledge to serve 2 years, but some decide that it really isn't for them and choose to be sent home. About 10% of our training class would be gone by the end of our time in Senegal. [ad name="Adsense Small Horz Banner"] Besides language and teacher training, we also had several classes per week in health and safety topics important in West Africa, where we had to worry about malaria and lots of other interesting parasites. Safety where emergency medical care is not always quickly available was also important. And cultural training was critical as we Americans had to make our way politely and effectively through a predominately Muslim, male-dominated society (more of a challenge for the single women, who make up the majority of the Peace Corps volunteers). But a few classes descended into a complaining session about things that none of us could change anyway.
I happened to be in training during the 1998 World Cup, which was an experience. Senegal's team would not be in the cup that year, but Brazil was a fan favorite, and the people there also generally supported France, the eventual champion, so it was exciting. Televisions were rolled out into the courtyards and onto the sidewalks, neighbors gathered around watching and talking and cheering, some passing from house to house.
As education volunteers (some teaching English and others teaching Math like myself) we spent 4 weeks specifically practicing teaching skills. Senegalese children from the neighborhood got a month of free instruction during the summer, which they were suprisingly enthusiastic about, and we got to try out our methods, observe others, and work our way up to getting through the standard (in West Africa) 2 hour class period with groups as large as 80 students (which is also sadly sometimes the standard in West Africa). This training segment was extremely valuable as you can imagine. It is one thing to understand the subject and know the French vocabulary, and it is another thing entirely to write a lesson plan, and teach that lesson plan in French in front of a classroom of children testing and adjusting as you go to be sure they are keeping up with you and learning the material.
[ad name="Peace Corps In Line Banner"] Then, after all of that, we were off to Guinea, finally, for the final two weeks of training. A short bus ride to the airport in Dakar and a short version repeat of our travel experience from New York to Senegal in the first place (but shorter) and we were off. Peace Corps has a very good reputation for training in language and cross-cultural communication, and I feel that they did themselves justice. But, training in this case was preparation for an experience that is hardly describable, so it was only the beginning of a stream of learning that would continue throughout my two year service.
Next week's article will discuss my arrival at my post in Guinea.