For those of you who like my soul searching [baring?] posts, this is not one of them. Stay tuned next week for more of that. This one is about pre-service training. What exactly is pre-service training? Glad you asked. If you thought, like I did at one point, that as soon as I got on the plane, I was an official Peace Corps Volunteer, you would be incorrect. At this point, I am a mere trainee. So what exactly am I doing right now?
Pre-Service Training [aka PST, but what I will mostly call training because I think documents with too many acronyms suck]
- PST is the Pre-Service Training that Peace Corps Trainees [me!] undergo before being sworn-in as official volunteers. It typically lasts 10-12 weeks and takes place in the country of service. My training will last 11 weeks and will occur in the town of Rwamagana. ,Rwamgana is a city of about 47,000, located in the Eastern part of the country. It’s located at 5000 feet above sea level [think Denver], and is about 30 miles east of the capital.
- The entire 10 weeks of training is scheduled with the exception of Sundays.
- Kinyarwandan class runs most days from 9-1
- Afternoon classes include technical topics like ‘hand washing’, ‘pooping in a hole’, ‘making Oral Re-hydration Salt’, ‘lighting a stove’, ‘taking a bath in a bucket’, ‘washing clothes by hand’, and other exciting topics like ‘preparing your Peace Corps reports’, ‘grant-writing 101’ ‘understanding the Rwandan genocide’ [side note: can anyone really understand genocide? I have visited Auschwitz; I’ve been to Bosnia [and other countries of former Yugoslavia]; the location or the ‘reasons behind it’, genocide is something I’ll never truly ‘understand’.]
- There are field trips!
- And chances to feel like kitties at the shelter [see ‘meeting the host family’ and ‘site announcement’ coming soon]
Essentially training is like going to summer camp where you know no one and being a freshman at college where none of your friends went all at the same time. Then you make friends, get a little comfortable, and then the rug is pulled out from under your feet again. This is training. And this is where some people quit. In Peace Corps’ parlance, it’s called early termination, and it essentially means you resign from your position as a ‘volunteer’.
In general, I’m not to suffer from test anxiety. In addition to the standard barrage of testing one does while in k-12 , I’ve taken the SAT, ACT, AP subject exams, GRE, MCAT, 2 respiratory licensing exams + one specialty exam, TEAS, an entire nursing program full of ATI exams, and NCLEX. However, the one thing all of these exams have in common is that they are computerized. No talking required. I very nearly didn’t graduate from my first go around in college due to the ORAL PROFICIENCY EXAM. I have always suffered from a crippling fear of public speaking/performance, and while I’ve gotten better as I’ve aged [matured?], it is still one of my least favorite things to do on the entire planet.
One of the requirements to be sworn in as a volunteer is to achieve a certain level on the language exam. It varies from language to language and program to program, but essentially one must score somewhere between novice-high and intermediate-mid depending on the difficulty of the language. The exam usually takes place in the next to last week of training and is essentially a recorded interview in the target language and is graded to determine a person’s fluency. [Side note: Google translate does not have Kinyarwandan as an option.]
Pre-Service Training concludes for everyone on the day of Swearing-IN, [for me, this occurs on August 14, 2018] which is a big ceremony with government officials and TV crews and fancy clothes. After taking our oaths we officially become Peace Corps Volunteers. Immediately after the ceremony we travel to our permanent sites and begin the two years [more or less] on our own. It’s an intense day.
