24 November 2014: Scene

I’m sitting here writing during boring boring training. Let me paint the picture for you. Some staff members and current volunteers they like to call “resource volunteers” are up at the front of the classroom we have appropriated from the school to use during training. 30+ of us trainees are sitting on either side of a U-shaped arrangement of tables. My partners and crime and I always opt for the outside corner. We are sitting in black plastic chairs that are too flexible, and if you lean back too far in them, there’s no way they will ever go back to upright. The walls are made of cinderblocks, and all the windows that open are open to let in at least a bit of a breeze in the heat. There are some tacky, blue and green flowered tablecloths on the folding tables, and most of them are starting to get little rips in them. A staff member is up at the front writing on a little easel-like white board, and occasionally tapes up big pieces of flip chart paper to the wall, none of which stay very well because packing tape on dusty cinderblocks is not exactly the best bonding combination. Sometimes I will get up and just stand by the window to avoid both my butt and my brain from falling asleep. After the shpeal, they will likely give us ten handouts that we will never look at again; an incredible waste of both time and paper. Later we’ll probably do some kind of redundant group activity, in which a select few will be really into it while the rest of us groan as we half-heartedly BS our way through the exercise. We will later probably come together and discuss what we learned or whatnot, with a healthy serving of snarky comments coming from a different select few. Some of us (the first select few) are rigorously taking notes, some are reading over Sesotho notes from that morning, some of us read, some doodle, some play things like dots or crossword-type games in our notebooks, some come up with Lesotho-themed Cards Against Humanity cards if they ever decided to come up with a Rural Africa extension pack, some wander to the latrine for no other reason than for something else to do, and some of us are blatantly carving chess pieces out of candles because it’s too much effort to pretend to care anymore. We have seen the light, as it were. We have seen our permanent sites. But now we are back Most people have given up on training because our longer-term futures are much clearer now.