Peace Corps service is broken into two main segments: a three month training session followed by 24 months of service. Our training began on October 19, and ends January 3 when we swear in as Peace Corps volunteers at the United States Embassy in Kigali. For those three months, we study culture, language, safety and security, medical, technical aspects (teacher training), and various miscellaneous tasks.
Culture: We study all cultural aspects of Rwanda. This includes the history and genocide, but includes faux-pas, dress, marriage, and perceptions about Americans and westerners in general.
Language: We have seven, 1.5 hour classes a week. These are 3-on-1 classes that are aimed at getting us to an intermediate level of Kinyarwanda by the end of training. The language is fairly intense, but necessary since this will be our only means of communication with our village during service.
Safety and Security: This deals with several aspects of living in a new country. A native Rwandan deals with all cultural and social issues that could hinder our health and safety. Transportation issues, locks, emergency action plans, and site situations are all dealt with in this section.
Medical: Rwanda has a fairly low concern for amoebas, parasites, and disease relative to other countries in Africa, but it is still a definite issue. People in Peace Corps say that the medical attention we receive is the best we will ever have in our lives. Medical training includes inoculations, AIDS, general sickness, malaria medication, diarrhea, and how medical issues are treated.
Technical: Five to six days a week we receive training on teacher pedagogy. We review educational theory, lesson plans, objectives, classroom management, learning styles, and aspects of the Rwandan education system. The Rwandan school system is in their American equivalent of summer break from the end of October to the beginning of January. Since the youth are out of school, the Peace Corps trainers have recruited children from the Nyanza region to come to our mock classrooms and acts as students for three weeks while we try out actual in-class lesson plans for four hours, five days a week.
Our training is conducted in a town called Nyanza, approximately two hours south of Kigali. There are 68 trainees, approximately 15 language and cultural facilitators (LCFs), and various additional staff (technical training staff, directors, medical, cooks, etc) that are assisting us with getting ready for the next two years. It is six to seven days a week, and fairly intense. However, the training will ensure us a smoother transition into our sites and help us deal with any issues inside and outside the classroom that we might encounter.
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