Dec 15-16, 2008
There has been a myriad of reasons why I haven’t been doing regular health lessons just yet. But that changed this week when I finally did an introductory health lesson at the madrasa (primary school). There are 240 kids at the school and I give the lessons to about 30 kids at a time. So on consecutive days, I’ve planned to give the same lesson several times over.
It went better than I could’ve asked. I started out by introducing myself to the kids and talking about what we’ll be doing in my classroom. It was sort of funny to some of them because a lot of them know me as the American girl who lives in their douar (or used to). So they came in and were asking me what I was doing in their school.
We talked a little bit about health and then I asked them to draw pictures of things they do to stay healthy. It was a good, easy introduction, but it also gave me an idea of where their knowledge of general health is at this point.
I was a little nervous the first time that the kids wouldn’t understand what I was asking or expected, or that they’d misbehave. This would be a huge problem since I’m not a disciplinarian and will let kids in a classroom get away with murder if it’s amusing enough. But the first session went well and by lunchtime the second-years were all inviting me over for lunch at their houses. We drew pictures of healthy foods and sports, and the mosque in my douar.
From here I’ll work on a full-length schedule of lessons that addresses the specific health concerns of my community. My sbitar staff will be especially helpful in this because they’ve lived here so long and know the community really well. My tentative plan is to create some sort of yearlong program that can be used by the teachers. The Ministry tells us that Health is supposed to be taught in the schools according to their mandates, and I think a big part of my role here will be to help make that happen.
At the next Ministry of Health meeting in January, I’ll have some numbers to put on the report I turn in! Yay!
Friday, February 13, 2009
IST
November 2-6, 2008
This week was IST, or In-Service Training. After our first five months of service, our stage met in Azrou to be further trained. The first five months of service were focused on community integration and fact-finding. We were basically laying the foundation for work we’ll do later.
It seems like we’re all on the right track and largely doing well. We started out the week by sharing success stories with our programming staff. They ranged from helping on vaccination days at sbitars, to assisting with equipe mobiles (vaccination drives in outer douars), to hosting our Moroccan friends for celebrations. We’ve done a lot of different things and it really underscored how different PC can look from region to region, and across Volunteers.
I feel pretty good about my time here after IST. It was good to hear that I don’t feel like the only one who wants to be “doing something.” Don’t get me wrong, I love my community here and the past five months have been invaluable. I’m feeling settled and like I have a pretty good gauge of what the next year and a half will look like. But when you have a group of high-achievers, it’s hard to convince them that just being in the community and talking to people is real work. And it doesn’t matter how many times in PST they told us we’d feel bored or useless in the time before IST. Even though we were warned, as with most things in Peace Corps words cannot prepare you for the extremity of reality.
Maybe now is a good time to explain a little bit about what constitutes “work” in Peace Corps. There are three goals in PC, and those are:
1. to help people of interested countries and areas in meeting their needs for trained men and women;
2. to help promote a better understanding of the American people on the part of peoples served; and
3. to help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of the American people.
So you can see how the focus is actually on stuff like being there and talking to people. Only one of the three goals actually addresses what we might consider work in a normal job.
But Peace Corps is never normal. I don’t have a schedule or actual direction. These two years are what I make them, and that’s one reason that the Peace Corps experience looks different for every Volunteer. If I find that my specific community needs something or wants to pursue a project, then we might be tackling an issue that doesn’t even present itself in a site 15 kilometers down the road. After five months of community assessment and relationship-building, I have a handle on where to begin.
At the beginning of the week at IST, we brainstormed ideas for projects that we’d like to pursue and spent the rest of the week framing project outlines. We discussed all the details with each other so that we could flesh out potential outcomes, problems, sustainability issues, etc. It was incredibly helpful. The project my group worked on was traditional birth attendant (TBA) training. This was helpful because in my sbitar I’ve met several TBAs with whom I’d like to establish better communication, so that we can work together to reduce infant mortality.
Our southern region (Tiznit) got together later on and decided on some big projects to do as a group. This is really exciting because we can plan more far-reaching and better events together. Because there hasn’t been a PC presence in our region for a while, a lot of us are first-time Volunteers. In my site, there hasn’t been a PCV since the mid-90s. And in some sites there’ve never been any. So other regions have ongoing projects and the new PCVs could really hit the ground running once they got to site in May. But because our second-year PCVs are all new, we’re still developing a lot of ideas.
Our goal is to make sure there are larger projects going on when the new PCVs come next May. That way, they can see the work in action from the time they arrive and we can develop projects for their sites. Our old Volunteers were great in helping us feel welcome and have been invaluable sources of information and advice. I’ve said before that I couldn’t have asked for a better region, and it’s true. So our goal is to use what they’ve done and taught us to develop larger projects across sites and sectors. You’ll see what that looks like as the projects in my community take shape.
This week was IST, or In-Service Training. After our first five months of service, our stage met in Azrou to be further trained. The first five months of service were focused on community integration and fact-finding. We were basically laying the foundation for work we’ll do later.
It seems like we’re all on the right track and largely doing well. We started out the week by sharing success stories with our programming staff. They ranged from helping on vaccination days at sbitars, to assisting with equipe mobiles (vaccination drives in outer douars), to hosting our Moroccan friends for celebrations. We’ve done a lot of different things and it really underscored how different PC can look from region to region, and across Volunteers.
I feel pretty good about my time here after IST. It was good to hear that I don’t feel like the only one who wants to be “doing something.” Don’t get me wrong, I love my community here and the past five months have been invaluable. I’m feeling settled and like I have a pretty good gauge of what the next year and a half will look like. But when you have a group of high-achievers, it’s hard to convince them that just being in the community and talking to people is real work. And it doesn’t matter how many times in PST they told us we’d feel bored or useless in the time before IST. Even though we were warned, as with most things in Peace Corps words cannot prepare you for the extremity of reality.
Maybe now is a good time to explain a little bit about what constitutes “work” in Peace Corps. There are three goals in PC, and those are:
1. to help people of interested countries and areas in meeting their needs for trained men and women;
2. to help promote a better understanding of the American people on the part of peoples served; and
3. to help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of the American people.
So you can see how the focus is actually on stuff like being there and talking to people. Only one of the three goals actually addresses what we might consider work in a normal job.
But Peace Corps is never normal. I don’t have a schedule or actual direction. These two years are what I make them, and that’s one reason that the Peace Corps experience looks different for every Volunteer. If I find that my specific community needs something or wants to pursue a project, then we might be tackling an issue that doesn’t even present itself in a site 15 kilometers down the road. After five months of community assessment and relationship-building, I have a handle on where to begin.
At the beginning of the week at IST, we brainstormed ideas for projects that we’d like to pursue and spent the rest of the week framing project outlines. We discussed all the details with each other so that we could flesh out potential outcomes, problems, sustainability issues, etc. It was incredibly helpful. The project my group worked on was traditional birth attendant (TBA) training. This was helpful because in my sbitar I’ve met several TBAs with whom I’d like to establish better communication, so that we can work together to reduce infant mortality.
Our southern region (Tiznit) got together later on and decided on some big projects to do as a group. This is really exciting because we can plan more far-reaching and better events together. Because there hasn’t been a PC presence in our region for a while, a lot of us are first-time Volunteers. In my site, there hasn’t been a PCV since the mid-90s. And in some sites there’ve never been any. So other regions have ongoing projects and the new PCVs could really hit the ground running once they got to site in May. But because our second-year PCVs are all new, we’re still developing a lot of ideas.
Our goal is to make sure there are larger projects going on when the new PCVs come next May. That way, they can see the work in action from the time they arrive and we can develop projects for their sites. Our old Volunteers were great in helping us feel welcome and have been invaluable sources of information and advice. I’ve said before that I couldn’t have asked for a better region, and it’s true. So our goal is to use what they’ve done and taught us to develop larger projects across sites and sectors. You’ll see what that looks like as the projects in my community take shape.
SIAAP meetings
October 9, 2008
Today was our Ministry of Health meeting. All the Tiznit Health PCVs get together every three months at the Ministry of Health office in Tiznit to talk about progress, issues, and plans for future work.
There was a Ministry of Education delegue there this time, and he talked about the importance of going to schools to do formal health education with the kids. Because the Ministry of Ed was at this meeting and is stressing this as a project we need to do… At our July meeting, the delegue had been there to talk to us about working in the schools. Every three months we’ll turn in a lesson plan of what we plan on teaching until the next SIAAP (that's the regional branch of the Ministry) meeting.
The two schools in my site include a madrasa (primary school) and lycee (secondary school). Both are fairly large, with a few hundred kids at each. As soon as the mudir (principle) at each school receives a letter of permission from the Ministry, we can begin our health lessons. There has to be official authorization for us to be in the schools in order to teach. This is actually different in different regions in Morocco, so this is the process for Tiznit and some other regions but not all of them.
From here on out, we’ll be turning in reports of our activities at each meeting. These will include all our health lessons in the schools, vaccination drives we help out with, and anything we do that involves health education.
Today was our Ministry of Health meeting. All the Tiznit Health PCVs get together every three months at the Ministry of Health office in Tiznit to talk about progress, issues, and plans for future work.
There was a Ministry of Education delegue there this time, and he talked about the importance of going to schools to do formal health education with the kids. Because the Ministry of Ed was at this meeting and is stressing this as a project we need to do… At our July meeting, the delegue had been there to talk to us about working in the schools. Every three months we’ll turn in a lesson plan of what we plan on teaching until the next SIAAP (that's the regional branch of the Ministry) meeting.
The two schools in my site include a madrasa (primary school) and lycee (secondary school). Both are fairly large, with a few hundred kids at each. As soon as the mudir (principle) at each school receives a letter of permission from the Ministry, we can begin our health lessons. There has to be official authorization for us to be in the schools in order to teach. This is actually different in different regions in Morocco, so this is the process for Tiznit and some other regions but not all of them.
From here on out, we’ll be turning in reports of our activities at each meeting. These will include all our health lessons in the schools, vaccination drives we help out with, and anything we do that involves health education.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
