The Week that was (Written 10/28/07)

Man, time really seems to be flying as we get closer to the end of the school year. This past week just felt like it flew by – but even so, there were a few nuggets worth mentioning. On Wednesday, I went to Group 79s training village for a Survival Skill session. No, this is not a session where we focus on how to make fire or how to create a shelter out of coconut leaves – it focuses on current volunteers giving some practical advice to the trainees about how to survive in the culture and workplace of Samoa. For this session we had Aaron and Sally (Group 77), Dianne (Group 75), Michael / Louise (Australian volunteers) and I – so a pretty good range of viewpoints. Although we - the Peace Corps Volunteers that were there - are all capacity builders, we all live in very different communities and have different work environments. Fono, our security officer, had some preset questions for us to answer, such as:

How does it feel to work/live in Samoa as:

-           A man

-           A woman

-           A young person

-           An older person

-           A developmental worker

-           A foreigner

We tried to give a fair and balanced view of living and working in Samoa – which can be kind of difficult once you have lived here for a while. Not that living in Samoa is bad or anything, but I didn't want to impart any of my prejudices or things like that onto the volunteers – have to let them make up their own mind and have their own experiences. Amazingly, that was one of the hardest things to do – keep a balanced perspective – because you want to give them plenty of warning on what to expect but we have no idea what their community will be like so we should not have them go into their workplace with a preconceived bias. It was a pretty interesting session, lasted about an hour and a half, and I don't think we scared them to much. I believe that this was my first survival skills session during my two years in Samoa, but I'm not sure. One of the main reasons I decided to do it was because for the past 2-3 times Fono has asked me to do these sessions they are usually in the morning and always on a weekday, which meant I would have to miss a few class periods in order to do it. This time the session took place in the afternoon (so I would only need to miss 2 classes) and this would be my final time to help out – so I decided why not give it a try. Glad I did because it was a lot of fun and I got to see the training village.

The training village for Group 79 is Lalomauga which is a village located (literally) down the street from my training village of Falevao. This was the first time I had even been in that area since my mom came to visit in May – so it had been a while. While Lalomauga does not have a beach, it does have a moderately clean river that runs through the center of the village (this same river runs through Falevao, but it's much nastier because of the waste that's accumulated in it) and a suspension bridge that goes over the bridge. The training center is an old church building which is located next to the new church building. While not as beautiful as a few of the previous training villages (Group 76-78), if all of Group 79 is able to survive Lalomauga they can probably last a long time in Samoa.

Another highlight of the week came on Thursday when I handed out some prizes to my students. Around this time the students are doing nothing but review work as they prepare for their national exams – which means two things: 1) kids stop coming to school because they can't afford to pay their school fees, but they will show up for their national exams and 2) kids aren't as into school as they were towards the beginning of the school year. Both of these factors combine to make the last few weeks of teaching very tough because you have fewer students to teach (which might be construed as a good thing, but then you realize that the students who are missing classes will take the national exam, bomb it and that will reflect badly on the teacher) and they are less motivated. So for my year 13 classes I had a little quiz competition for them – using questions from the previous Year 13 national exams. For the most part, it was a success because many of the students knew the answers without having to use their notes to much. The quiz competition took place over a 5 day period (which was a good thing because of all the disruptions that took place during those 5 days) and the students seemed to enjoy it. Just like the final exam, I told them before hand that there would be a prize – but this time there would be a prize for the losing team and the winning team. Now back to Thursday, which was the day I gave out the prizes which was free internet time at ClickNet. I bought the time as a gift for my classes because we were suppose to have a working internet café at the school during this school year, but that fell through. For the losing team, I gave them 15 minutes of internet time and for the winning team, I gave them 30 minutes of internet time. Now you may say "15 minutes? That's not a lot of time" but the purpose of the prize was not to give them unlimited time but to get them to actually try the internet and find out what it's about. I gave the classes a crash course on how to use the internet, but my main advice was to go to the café and actually try it out.

Unfortunately, some of the students weren't as receptive as I would have liked. For those students that understood what the internet was (or at least had an interest in trying it), they really liked the prize. For those students who had never been on the internet (they had only heard of it), they didn't like it so much – they would much rather have candy or a flash drive (i.e. physical items) then something that they didn't understand. Hopefully they take advantage of this unique gift and don't just give it away to someone else because they do not understand how important/great the internet can be – especially if half of them go on to University next year. We'll see – I'll ask Eugene if any of my students come in and use their special codes.

Now that's the week that was, this is the week that is. Monday we are suppose to have a national tsunami drill – which should be interesting to see if it goes smoothly. Chanel College is one of the evacuation points in a tsunami, so I'm safe (and for the drill, I don't have to go anywhere). This is also the last week of school…Hooray! Wednesday is my last day of class (for Chanel and Faatuatua College) and after that I won't know what to do with myself. I'm sure I'll find something to keep me busy for my last few weeks in country. L8r!