The Next Three Months (in a nutshell)

As it turns out, Peace Corps isn’t exactly what I expected...but then again, does anything ever turn out the way you want or expect it to?  Coming in, I expected to be trained in a specific area of health (ie. HIV/AIDS, nutrition, etc), however we (the volunteers) are trained on a very broad spectrum of things and are expected to kind of choose on our own which of those areas we would like to focus our work on.  We were trained (vaguely) in HIV/AIDS, nutrition/malnutrition, hygiene (body and home), family planning, and malaria.  When asked what I do or why I am here...it's always tough for me to give a solid answer.  For one, because I'm not sure which of these I will be working with and I don't want to say I'm going to work in a certain area and then later on, not actually work in that area.

In determining what exactly our "job" will be for the next two years, the volunteers are required to use the first three months at our sites to do a Community Health Assessment (CHA).  The CHA is basically a report that we will write at the end of our first three months, highlighting the things that we've found that do and don't work within the realm of healthcare within our communities.  We are expected to meet the important people (Chief, Chair of Social Affairs, etc) within the community during this time so that they can know who we are and why we are here, we are expected to survey the different programs that the community currently has that are doing well and the ones that need improvements, and we are to build strong, trusting relationships so that the people within the community will be willing to open up to us when it is time to find the information to be included in our final reports.  We will submit our reports at our in-service training in October and upon further evaluation of the report by both Peace Corps and ourselves, we will decide on what our major project will be...in other words, we will find out in October what our "job" will consist of for the next two years. 

This method of "work," I think, has it's pros and cons.  It would have been nice to have a little bit more structure to our training so that we would know more about a specific topic rather than a little bit about several topics.  I kind of feel like we as volunteers could be more productive with a more focused training period.  However, the fact that we are able to design our own projects based on our interests and the needs within the community can be seen as a good thing.  I think the volunteers will be much more committed to a project that they have a genuine interest in, rather than being trained in something that they were, more or less, forced to work on.  Also, the needs of each community are different.  For some, malaria is a major issue (like in my village), and for others the issue is malnutrition or poor family planning.  I can appreciate the CHA in that it allows us to take a close look at where we can be the most productive and what will be the most beneficial to the communities that we live in.  Although this experience is 180 degrees different from what I initially expected, it is still very fulfilling.  As with any other endeavor, it has its pros and its cons, but the pros are definitely outweighing the cons.

Love and Peace Corps,

Dametreea