Thoughts on Practice School

Well here I am, half way through l'école practique, with exactly two weeks until I become an official Peace Corps Volunteer. While there have been a few rewarding moments, practice school been a really exhausting and frustrating experience. In a typical day, I'll have to turn students away at the door for coming in late, kick them out during the middle of class, make students move around, and repeatedly say TAISEZ-VOUS or DU SILENCE without much of a result. After teaching, I'll then have to spend hours planning the lesson for the next day and trying to figure out how to get the kids to behave. Once that is over, it's feedback time from the trainers which is always really discouraging because they won't have liked the way you changed the example from the book, or they will tell you that you smile too much. Even if you have done a great job, they will always have criticisms. It gets even worse on test days due to the cheating. In one exam I took away a notebook a kid had hidden in his desk, five minutes later, I took a cheat sheet away from the same kid. Finally, I ended up ripping up two exams ten minutes before the end of class.

For the first couple of days of practice school, I was really timid because I'm not used to having that much authority and being able to exercise it. Now, even my stone cold trainer has said that I'm am finally becoming strict enough. Every night before I go to bed, I spend hours feeling guilty and thinking about how I treated the kids and whether the kids I kicked out really deserved it. I know that I am here to help the kids, and I've just been trying to keep that in mind. Hopefully once I get to site and get to work with the same kids for more than a week, I'll be able to gauge whether or not I am making a difference.

So what happens once I'm actually a volunteer? After I swear in on the 18^th, I'll head to my site the next day. There I'll be sitting tight until school starts the first or second week of October. Due to the upcoming legislative elections (not presidential), all volunteers have to stay at their sites and won't be able to visit others, go to the regional capitals, etc. As with most things in Guinea, you just have to wait and see what happens and hope that violence doesn't break out. The town of Dubreka has been buzzing with election stuff. Most of you heard that I saw the President several weeks ago. In addition to his visit, the candidates have been campaigning all over town which means lots of extra people, an increased military presence, more noise than usual, and lots of electricity! We've gotten electricity at least once a day for the past week which is a vast improvement compared to the once a week max I've seen throughout training. While I am slightly nervous to be here during elections, it's been really interesting observing everything tied to them and hopefully good things will come out of them! Until next time,

Kadiatou, Yama, or Umu (ooo-moo)

(I'm still working on picking out a Guinean name to use at site!)