IST and Beyond

As mentioned in my last blog post, I recently spent two weeks in Gaborone for In-Service Training (IST). The two and a half months we spent in Serowe before going to site was meant to teach us about Batswana culture, language, and the Peace Corps methods of development aka capacity building and one-on-one approaches. IST however, was meant to bring us back together after our three months of integration and provide us with more concrete skills and information so that we can begin our projects.

First things first, let me write about the unbelievably exciting notion of being in a nice hotel with all the friends you haven’t seen in three months. I was a little nervous that IST would be as overwhelming and exhausting as PST, but the second I started running into friends and receiving dozens of hugs, I stopped caring. Add in the fact that this hotel had hot showers, free wifi, freen meals, and  AIR CONDITIONING, and I was pretty much in volunteer heaven. I started noticing how much we had all changed when my roommate and I began hoarding the complimentary hot chocolate and sugar packets to take back to our villages. (Hey, food is expensive, no judgment allowed.) I think the most noticeable difference in our cohort was in the appearances of the men. They’d pretty much all lost weight and about half of them were now sporting big beards.

Anyway, IST turned out to be pretty similar to PST in a lot of ways – Setswana lessons in the morning and long sessions on Peace Corps policies in the afternoons. However, some of the changes I enjoyed were: having passionate guest speakers from different NGOs in Botswana talk about their goals and strategies, and receiving training in specific tools Peace Corps uses for behavior change such as Kings Pack and STEPS films. Kings Pack training was a ton of fun. The Kings Foundation is an NGO from the UK that provides volunteers all around Southern Africa with a big red backpack full of fun. These backpacks have disks, ropes, tennis balls, hula-hoops, Frisbees, beanbags, and just about every other game you can think of. We spent an amazing morning playing many games and learning how to use these tools to teach different life skills such as hand washing or malaria prevention, and even using games to bring up issues like gender norms. At their core, Kings Foundation is about providing kids with the right to play and the right to be kids for as long as possible. That message feels particularly important when it seems as though children are forced to grow up too quickly. Over the last three months I have loved getting to know the children in my village. Their enthusiasm is contagious and even on my hardest days they make me smile. I cannot wait to use my Base Pack at the primary school in my village.

Finally, IST was really useful because everyone I could possibly want to talk to about project ideas and strategies was walking around in the same hotel. I had the chance to learn about what other volunteers plan to do, what older volunteers are already doing, and then talk to programming staff about what I would like to start in my village and ask how to go about doing that. We also had a couple of days where each volunteer’s counterpart was at the hotel for some training too. Mine, sadly, could not make it, but I had the opportunity to learn about cultural protocols and the different methods of consulting from the counterparts of other volunteers.

Seeing my friends and enjoying all the comforts of the hotel was wonderful, but after two weeks I was ready to get back to my village. It turns out I really enjoy my quiet village life and the bustling capital that is Gaborone was starting to wear me out. After 10 very long hours of buses and waiting for buses to leave, I made it home to my angry kitten and all my lovely neighbors. It’s good to be home.