MJ Live

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

The Talk (Written 6/14/06)

Today was a very full day from my perspective – it involved a lot of talking to various people. And if you know me, I'm not much of a talker so at the end of the day I was very drained. So my day started off with school, but today was special because for Year 12 we were getting a visit from some verifiers (kind of like subject watchmen) who would look over our program for Year 12 and tell us if we need to make any improvements and see how things are going. Well, for Computer Studies – all of the subject is graded by what the Ministry of Education sends us, there really is not teacher assigned evaluation which meant that there was really no point to us getting a verification visit. But, as HOD, I went through the process and the verifier came to the same conclusion I had come to – our program is judged by the tests that the Ministry sends us, not by the teacher so it was hard to verify our subject. Just one of the perks of being a new subject and getting the kinks work out – the only downside was that the meeting took me away from a class (Year 13) which kind of sucked. For the class that I missed I set work of trying to figure out what topic they wanted to present next week as part of their learning about Powerpoint – I told them to think of topic that interested them and, if they needed to, use Encarta to help find information about that topic. I thought it was a pretty easy assignment but when I got back to class I found out that a lot of the students couldn't wrap their heads around the concept of 'choose your own topic'. They kept asking me 'what do you want it to be about?' and my response was 'What interests you?' It was quite an interesting 3 minute conversation just trying to get across the point that I wasn't going to tell them what topic to choose – and from this conversation I also found out that they didn't know how to use Encarta (or an encyclopedia in general) which kind of surprised me (my kids tend to poke around on the computer a lot and I thought for sure they would have opened Encarta at least once). So that led to me doing a quick after school class on Encarta and how to use it – we'll see if the kids are able to come up with interesting topics though. 

After I got done with school, I rushed down to Apia and went to the Peace Corps office to see our PCMO about my shoulder. Everything else from my bike trip to Savaii has healed up except for my left shoulder which still gives me pain (which is very pronounced when I put on or take off a t-shirt). So she sent me to a PC affiliated doctor and he basically said that nothing appeared to be broken or dislocated. Apparently, when I fell on my shoulder I jammed a certain part of my shoulder (not the part connected to the arm or the collarbone, there's a small piece of bone that's separate from those two – I hurt that small piece of bone and tweaked the cartilage around it) and it's an injury that may take several weeks to heal up but no long term damage was done which was quite nice to hear (I couldn't afford to take a trip to Hawaii right now got to much work to do). So he said just try to strengthen the muscle a little bit and it should be good to go maybe in a few months.

 After that enlightening conversation, I went back to the Peace Corps office to meet up with some of the other current volunteers and get ready for the Gender talk we were going to give tonight. MacBarr (Group 72) and Ralph (Group 74) were my partners for this little activity in which we talk to the new trainees about some of the issues they may face when they go to their training village (of Vaie'e) this Saturday. Before the talk, though, we went to Apia Central (ahhh, how I've missed that place – it definitely has a different feel now that I'm a volunteer and not living their all the time) and helped out with the skits that were meant to prepare the trainees for what they will encounter during their first few days in their village. It was quite interesting looking at the skit because now instead of the skit being some kind of weird 'Is this really going to happen' experience it was more like 'Yup, that's going to happen' and 'I've definitely experienced that' which allowed me to give some insight into that village life that will be brand spanking new to the trainees. I definitely felt like I've been here a while when I was watching those skits and giving my observations on it to the trainees. After the skits were done, the 8 guys of the group (if you want to know the names of all the trainees visit Stephanie (Group 76) blog, the link is in my sidebar towards the bottom) plus MacBarr and Ralph headed over to my house – you know, party central this week! It was a good time of just answering some of the pressing questions the trainees have about not only village life but also Samoan culture. I was surprised by how much knowledge we three (MacBarr, Ralph and myself) were able to give to the trainees and we all come from very different situations (MacBarr and Ralph are more village based then I am). They seemed to appreciate the advice and hopefully we didn't overwhelm them with to much. Unlike with my group, Group 76 will spend two weeks in the village during their first trip (their village trip breaks down as 2 weeks in the village, 1 week in Apia, 3 weeks in the village, 1 week in Apia, 2 weeks in the village) so it will be interesting to hear how their experience went.

It's official now, I'm an old timer Peace Corps! Now, no more parties at my house until Group 77's fiafia (in October)! L8r.

PS – the windows in my 3rd lab were finally finished today and tomorrow (Thursday) is a holiday, so I will probably be spending the majority of the day cleaning up that third lab and moving computers into it. Who said that being a Peace Corps was a two year vacation? There's no rest for the volunteer, but I love it and wouldn't have it any other way.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi, just wanted to thank you for putting up your blog ... I'm a samoan away from home, but before I left I worked with pcvs in my office. Reading your blog has made me realise that pc trainees (and volunteers, too) really do have to go through alot of changes when they come to samoa ... we always took it for granted that the training period was long enough for the volunteers to adjust and get used to the place/people/culture difference.
Sounds like you're doing good work at Chanel. Malo lava le onosai :)