Week four and everything seems to be going downhill.
Yesterday was an especially hard day at training. It had been raining pretty
much all weekend, which continued until around mid-day yesterday. We are
definitely in the rainy season. The sound of the rain on the roof of the school
where we do training made it hard to hear anyone speak. Our sessions were about
community assessments and behavior change, and with the exception of one
exercise where we charted men/women/childrens daily and seasonal schedules, it
was all very theoretical and not applicable to anything in real life. People
were obviously over it and not paying attention at all, and proceeded to be
basically shamed and emptily threatened by the staff leading the session. Wow.
Thanks for treating us like small children. So that happened, and there’s also
the fact that one of us in the group went home (as in back to the US) yesterday
suddenly. During staging in Philadelphia, the woman leading the whole thing
talked about how when she was in Thailand as a PCV, when she and her friend
were especially frustrated, they would go to a certain hill and just yell
(apparently, the Thai people responded to this by commenting that Americans are
so very expressive!). Remembering this and thinking it was the right time, a
few of us went outside in our rain jackets during lunch and found a nice
termite mound a short distance from the school overlooking a sloping
forest/field. We stood up there in pairs and had our own little screaming mound
moment. It was definitely needed. It was a combination of the ridiculous
training sessions, the fact that our Basotho families didn’t see us as shiny
and novel anymore (and we, them) and were getting annoyed by little things,
that we couldn’t make our own food yet, and the nonstop rain.
No comments:
Post a Comment