Technical In-Service Training

I only noticed now that it has been since March since I last posted on this blog.  Radio silence from me at this point means that I am busier at site, which is a good thing!  But I do have a few posts to include on this blog in order to keep you up with what is happening here in Macedonia.  I guess it is easier to start from the recent events and go back from there.

This past week was sort of a reunion for all of the Peace Corps volunteers from the MAK-18 group.  Starting Monday, the Community Development volunteers and our counterparts were required to come to Skopje to attend Technical In-Service Training.  We were all required to be in the capital until Tuesday, when our counterparts were able to leave and when the TEFL volunteers arrived for our volunteer meeting on Wednesday.  Then these past two days, the TEFLs had their technical training.  Given such a complicated schedule, I applaud the PC team in Macedonia for organizing this.

I posted the schedule of the event below, but as you can tell, a lot of what we discussed was aimed at either grant writing or completing reports that will “gauge” our impact in Macedonia.  Such forms include the VRF (Volunteer Response Form) which will provide qualitative and quantitative data regarding our individual work for the PC staff in Macedonia and for the US government back home.

Overall, the training was much more useful than I had thought it would be weeks before.  I worried that the whole seminar would be a “bitch session” where volunteers publicly lamented about their individual situations.  But having our counterparts at the first two days of the sessions probably inhibited such a scenario.  The conference seemed most successful for those who had their counterparts present, since Peace Corps drove much of what PCVs tell their counterparts at work.  For example, what organizations should and should not do when applying for certain grants.  Or how to complete our reports together that best measures our combined work. 

Eventually, as soon as the counterparts left and all of the volunteers were together on Wednesday, we discussed the most sensitive subject regarding PC Macedonia- host families.  Each session turned to the problems pertaining to the requirement that 100% of volunteers in Macedonia must live with host families.  Just to substantiate how problematic this topic seems to be, about 7 people are unhappy with their homestay situation, and an additional 7 had changed homestays in the past 2 months (out of 33 volunteers present at the conference).  But I leave my discussion on home stays for another post (soon to come).

My good feelings were validated during the Mental Health Session when we were asked to stand somewhere in the room, placing ourselves on a spectrum of how we felt about our experience in PC Macedonia.  Luckily, nobody stood near the sign that said “I am ready to go home.”  However, only 4 of us (including me) stood near “I am starting to see the impact of my work here.”  The four of us gushed about how much we were enjoying our times in Macedonia.  Publicly saying how happy I was helped me realize how great of a situation I was placed into and built up over the past few months.  I am happy for many reasons, but I am mostly happy because I am busy and my work is actually making a difference.  Maybe I am a bit neurotic, but I enjoyed that, at multiple times, I was late for sessions because I needed to plan a seminar for this weekend with my counterpart.

Of course, much of this can change over the year, especially given the difficult situation with AIESEC Macedonia.  But until then I will continue to invest in my hard work.

I also want to comment that each day during the sessions, I was exhausted because on average I probably achieved only 5 hours of sleep each night during the conference.  Seeing volunteers in such a group for the first time since PST was refreshing, and I did not want to miss an opportunity to discuss and learn from as each night our conversations dragged into the late hours. 

Finally, the last organized event for the CD volunteers was a dinner with the staff.  This dinner was special for us since the rule that prohibited staff and PCVs to drink together was recently repealed.  I was lucky to draw the number that allowed me to dine with the training manager, Evelina, and the Country Director, Corey.  Eventually the conversation steered toward, you guessed it, homestays.  But it was a great bookend to a weekend full of useful information and reunions.

Brian, his counterpart from Negotino, Ted, and me

Dinner with staff on our last night during IST