Training Day 1 (ish)

So, I suppose I should give some background on this training. Whenever we have Peace Corps trainings, we are always reminded of those cuts to the Peace Corps budget, which tend to constrain things a bit (e.g. lower quality of speakers). However, when there is funding from PEPFAR, things become a lot less constrained. This training was about HIV and AIDS, so we received a grant from PEPFAR. Now, all of us still haven't fully taken in the beautiful hotel we are staying at in Mombasa. We bask in our air conditioned rooms with refrigerators and amazingly comfortable beds (they assigned us roommates this time, so I'm not with Nick :-(, but Nemo is a pretty cool guy, so I can't complain). We are right on the beach (gorgeous ocean view, especially from the bar where they have swings instead of seats) and the hotel has two pools (one has a waterslide as well) and volleyball, ping-pong and other games. The beers are 210 shillings (a little over $2.50) which is pretty extravagant on our salary, but other than that, it's amazing.

The purpose of this training is mainly to work with a counterpart from our community to figure out what kind of interventions we can work on related to HIV/AIDS in our community. I am one of two volunteers who did not bring a counterpart. Most of the teachers at my school just wanted to rest a bit, so I wasn't going to push anything on them. Also, this is only half of my training group (well, a little more than half) and the rest of them will have their training in less luxurious conditions closer to their sites in central Kenya two weeks from now. We've all been catching up a lot and bonding over everything. Lots and lots of laughs :-)

So far, we have been working mostly on language. They initially wanted to give us some formal training in our local languages (in my case kitaita) but they decided that it would be better to focus on Kiswahili only. (With one group learning their local language, called Kikamba. We've all stopped asking at this point, but I bet we would have been told about the budget cuts if we had asked why local languages had been cut.) The groups were self-selecting, and I think that I found myself in the group that feels most comfortable speaking Kiswahili. The four of us (myself, Jonathan, Chris and Harmony) grabbed a wonderful teacher named Evans to be our language tutor. He asked us where we wanted to start, so we began with bad words. That lesson was actually a lot of fun. We spent most of yesterday and then part of today just working on language. It was mostly grammar stuff, which was useful, though I need more work on my vocabulary. Still, we came up with some interesting lines (I can now say in Kiswahili: We should have breakfast tomorrow. When I wake you, should I call your phone or nudge you? [lovingly borrowed from the movie Sneakers]) and actually learned a lot about both language and culture. Now, the counterparts have arrived, so language is pretty much over (we won't get another Kiswahili lesson from Peace Corps for a very long time). I'll definitely miss Evans, although I'm sure that at times, Jonathan and I were a bit much for him.

After our session, several of us headed to the beach. In fact, most of the math/science education volunteers were there (well, actually only 50%, but most of them weren't at the training) so we played and joked for a while in the beautiful ocean water. Then, we went over to the diving platform and did some dives there. After an hour or so, I went to the pool to swim there a little bit. Then, we went to dinner (continuing the trend of amazing food) and went back to the lounge where we found the entertainment for the evening would be bingo. We all became very excited about this. The man who was running it was a Kenyan, though he gave the instructions in flawless English and German (at least it sounded flawless to my ears) since the resort is run by Germans and attracts a lot of German tourists (we've befriended some Austrians who are also staying here, though I think they don't enjoy it when I try to speak German). The only challenge for the emcee was when we asked him to give the instructions in Swahili (kinda reflects the clientele to be found here). Chris (one of the business volunteers and an all-around funny guy; he was in my language group earlier) won the first round, but the Austrians managed to win the next two rounds. The third round was especially close, and led to a showdown after the Austrian (Volcker) tied with a British kid who wore a cape and seemed like he was just coming from a Harry Potter convention. After all that excitement, it seemed better that the prize went to Volcker, as it was a large bottle of alcohol, and this kid was probably twelve years old.

I haven't met many counterparts, but they seem nice so far. I'm having a really great time!