One of my fears were not integrating into the community, not feeling comfortable with my host family and being homesick. Ok, that’s three fears, but they’re all related. I’m quite pleased with how that all has worked out. I am getting to know my training community, and they are recognizing me and remembering my name. I am conversing with some; any opportunity that arises. I’m really engaging people, which I’m proud of. It’s good to know (or perhaps reaffirm) I can make friends with new people/environments. My new anxiety is regarding my specific job as a PCV. Sure, I can integrate and share my culture with them, but will I be a professional at my job? Will I be competent? For awhile, training seemed to be easy as pie, with us all getting comfortable with things and trying to find similar comforts there. But with a few KEEPRAH assignments and a two hour immersion in a primary school classroom, I’ve come to appreciate the finer goals/instructions of the PC.
KEEPRAH and PACA are two acronyms for tools to help us analyze and understand our communities. Every week, we'll be given different assignments where we have to go into the communities. So far, we've made a map of our community and interviewed different people to learn about Kinship, Associations and Education in our training village. In my village, there's two other trainees, and we do these assignments together and then present them to the whole group. We've also gotten to visit the primary school in our village, which was exciting. Our first visit, we played with the kids during recess, then the second time, we were there to observe. That quickly turned into taking on the class by ourselves, and because we had played with the kids before, they didn't look at us as authority figures! Lesson learned.
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