Happy 2009! A big post to start off the year.

So training is pretty much over. We had our final Swahili exam last week, and they told me that I need to practice more (certainly true, but I hope to have a different examiner next time). Last night we had a big shindig at the training center, Nemo (one of the other teaching trainees) pulled out his guitar, and played all manner of requests and suffered through our tone-deaf attempts at singing (there are some good singers in the group I'm sure, but they were pretty well drowned out by those of us who remembered more lyrics and felt like belting them out). I guess I won't be tossing a frisbee (sahani ndege means bird plate, so that's how we translate it) for a little while until I'm settled into site, so I will miss that part of training (it was our ritual during breaks to play catch).

A teaching volunteer who has been in Kenya for a year now came to talk about her experiences and answer our pressing questions. Kelly has been wonderful, and we were all very grateful to talk with someone who knew what we were going through and who could assuage most of our fears. I'm also really excited to meet a current business volunteer who has been working on some kind of recycling project (perhaps a chance to pick up on where I left off with the water sachet project, in which case I will probably be talking to Jackie, Aparna and Pastor George).

We have just made it to Nairobi (the stress of the 8 hour bus ride was eased by several long games of Contact) and soon I will know where I am going. I have my suspicions, but I don't want to jinx anything. I talked to a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV) who started in Kenya 5 years ago, and she was talking about her experiences using acronyms that mean nothing to me and she was very confused about the fact that we still don't know our site placements. Hopefully I will have a nice long post about my site, my project and my supervisor at the end of this week.

In a lot of ways, I feel pretty relieved that training is over (most importantly, no more sessions on the 8-4-4 system in Kenya [8 years primary school, 4 years secondary school and 4 years university] which is a point that our technical trainer heavily emphasized along with other bureaucratic tedia). I had gotten pretty comfortable living independently, and I lost a whole ton of that independence staying with a family in here. They were very nice people, but in a lot of ways I found some of the transitions difficult (for example: I was always the youngest child, and in my Kenyan family, I was the oldest). I also had a rather uncomfortable situation during the good-byes (I've never been a huge fan of good-bye), so I still have mixed feelings about returning.

Of course, I will come back, because I have a lot of work to continue. After all my talk about charcoal, I could never get a kiln, so people are very intrigued about it, but skeptical because I still haven't been able to demonstrate it. I helped a man named Damian build a greenhouse, and if I want to build one at my site, I will want to get some info from him (training was a ways up in the hills of Kilimanjaro, but we always made really long walks down to his farm [shamba] and Kilimanjaro looked much taller from down there). There was also a man named Alpain Kimani who was the one trying to start a greenhouse movement, and he is a really remarkable man. My friend Fire was great, and I look forward to visiting him, but I never knew if he was actually interested in what I was talking about or if he was just humoring me.

I would love to come back during the training for Public Health volunteers in a few months. I left on pretty good terms with their technical trainer, and I talked to him about some HIV/AIDS projects (mostly using information coming from LearnTB and Project MILK), so he may try to invite me back for some technical demonstrations (this time I will arrive with an oil drum in tow). I also want to visit Abbas again. He was a good Swahili teacher and a creative man, and I am really hoping that I will see him in Ghana in a few months. I also talked a bit with some of the teachers at a secondary school here in Loitoktok about income-generating projects, so I hope I will be able to do some follow-up work if I come back while school is in session.

Speaking of school being in session, the new schoolyear in Kenya started today. You might think that that would imply that I would be working in a classroom or at a school in some capacity. Nope, that comes next week. There are some bureaucratic details to handle this week, so I'm leaving Nairobi Friday afternoon and diving in head-first. No idea what subjects I will be teaching, where I will be going or who will be my colleagues. I have told some of the staff here about my frustrations, and we knew that we were part of a very experimental training, so hopefully it will be a lot better next time. I should say that Joseph (our training manager), Kibet (the culture facilitator), Nancy (the technical supervisor) and Charles (the training assistant) did outstanding work, and I hope that they keep up the good work and improve training for next time.

The Peace Corps is set up so that my supervisor from their end is the Associate Peace Corps Director (APCD). Enos will hopefully match me to a good site. Timothy is the APCD for Public Health and I have talked to him several times and I really like him and hope to collaborate with him on some cross-sector projects. Louis is the APCD for Small Enterprise Development/Information & Communication Technology (SEDICT), but previously he worked for Practical Action, so I would really like to work with him on projects too.

I forgot to list books in my last post, so here goes. I discovered they had a library at the training center, so I started taking as many books as I could get my hands on. Farm and Community Forestry (one of the more current books in the library, written in 1983) provided some really good insight into successes and failures of forestry programs around the world (as a testament to its age, the authors were beginning to suspect that data provided by China about reforestation during the Cultural Revolution, while in Haiti, initial reforestation efforts were described as promising). I only got to read half of a book titled The Wind Power Book by Jack Park. The book was about 30 years old, and mostly talked about his attempts to build windmills in California, but there were a lot of practical applications, so I may try to use some of the information in the book, but I had to return it to the library when I was only halfway done, so I still have a lot to learn before I try to construct my first windmill. We were assigned a book called The First Days of School by Harry and Rosemary Wong. I found it to be one of the most useless books I have ever had the misfortune to read. Periodically, he would make good points, but then he would use abhorrent evidence to support his ideas. Generally, the book was more appropriate in the elementary school setting (and the American setting), so it was even more disappointing that they wanted us to read it to prepare for our work in a high school. (Harry also thought he made good points about high school education. He was pretty much universally wrong.) I got to start the book titled Rainwater Harvesting, which is a pretty standard technical manual, and I really liked it, but I also had to return that one before I could finish it (an outstanding book that I hope to finish soon). Finally, I couldn't resist my nature, and borrowed Electricity and Magnetism by David Griffiths (8.07 Textbook if that means anything to you) from another trainee (from Thursday, I will have to stop saying trainee and start saying volunteer) and brushed up on my E&M. The man is a really good writer, and offers such clear examples that you forget that you're reading a textbook. Depending on what books I find in Nairobi, I might finally get back to that Supreme Court cases book, but it seems doubtful for now.

For those of you from MIT who are about to go on D-Lab trips or IAP fellowships, have a safe and productive trip, and be sure to say Hi (or Hola) to people who know me. I woke up Katy (sorry Katy, that revenge was about 3 years in the making) to try to pass this on as well. I even got a text message response from Amy Smith, so I know that D-Lab Ghana will be amazing this year.

Take it easy for now.