TDW and A2E – Enough Acronyms to Fill a Book

Well it’s been over a month since I last posted, and I’ve got a lot to catch up on.  The problem is that the longer I go without writing the more I have to cover and the more daunting the task.  I think I’ll just split it into two posts.

I was chosen for the Training Design Workshop and Training of Trainers (TDW/TOT) for the new stage that got here yesterday.  It’s incredible how many acronyms Peace Corps has; I swear I must know at least 50.  I think next time we play a drinking game I’ll make that categories. 

Outside my door in the rain.  When it rains, it monsoons.

For TDW/TOT I spent a couple of weeks in Yaoundé.  On the way down I went up to visit a few towns in the Northwest and the West – Bamenda, Mbuda, and Dschang.  Every time I go down I marvel at how different it is compared to the North.  Even now, with the North in rainy season, it is nowhere near as lush.  I think the biggest difference is the dirt.  Up north it is basically sand and pea gravel.  You can leave your clothes to dry on the ground, like most people do, and they won’t get dirty.  Down south, even as close as the Adamaoua, anything that touches the ground gets covered in dark, red dirt.  It was a lot tougher to keep my clothes and myself clean. 

It was great to see my friends down there; it seems like they are all doing well.  I even met some of the new people that came in June and got to post about a month ago.  A couple of my friends down south in Wum and Widikum got some great new post mates, I’m a bit jealous.  Of course, nothing compares to the Dukes of Guider. 

TDW was really productive.  I feel good about the changes that we’ve made, and I think that the training for this new stage is going to be a lot better than ours.  This will only be the third Youth Development (YD) stage in Cameroon.  The Dazzling Dozen, the stage before us, did a lot of work to improve the training, and I hope that we made as much of a difference as they did.  Our stage doesn’t have a fancy name like that, we’re too cool for school; I’ve just been calling us the Second Stage. 

A good friend of mine who lives outside of Ngaounderé arranged for us to visit this waterfall and a lake.
Apparently the bottom of the lake has never been found.  The Adamaoua is a beautiful region.

There are basically four kinds of training that Peace Corps Trainees (PCTs) go through when they first get to country.  Medical, Cross-Cultural, Language, and Technical – the one for whichever sector they are in.  The training design team was only allowed to work on technical sessions, but I think we made a big difference.  We were able to take out a lot of the more useless sessions sent from Washington, and combine or adapt the ones that we thought were important or weren’t allowed to get rid of.  We made the homework more meaningful and easier to grade, and we’re putting all of the handouts and other materials into the Tech Training Manual so they don’t just get things every day that they end up throwing away, like I did.  I’m the YD Chair for Training Redesign, so I’ve been compiling everyone’s lesson plans, offering suggesting if I have any, and editing the Tech Training Manual.  It’s a lot of fairly tedious work. 

TOT was definitely less useful; it was just a lot of time spent watching other people give their lessons.  Everyone who was training had to give at least one lesson, and we had to watch one from each sector, and then one from everyone in YD.  I wish we had more time to work on the actual lessons then.  Instead I’ve had to do them at home, where my Internet is far from stellar.  I also had a few medical problems while I was there, but I’m fine now. 

My friend lives outside of Mbuda, in the West region.  There is a beautiful eucalptyus forest right outside her door.
I guess it played hell with the water table, but it is gorgeous.  
...I forgot the name of the town, which is bad since a good friend lives there and another did before her.

We had to rush up after the training to get back to Guider, where a friend of mine was putting on a conference for the A2Empowerment scholarship program.  The conference was for the host-country nationals that will be working with A2E in the Extreme North.  Since there are no PCVs up there anymore, they are trying to continue the program with just Cameroonians running it and sending the info in to us.  Guider was chosen because it is the farthest North post in the country, and closest to the Extreme North.  It went pretty well, but there are definitely some changes to be made for next time, and my session didn’t go nearly as well as I would have liked.  It was a learning experience. 

Since getting back I’ve been spending most of my time working on training stuff.  I have to head back in a week and a half or so to do the two weeks of training.  I’m focusing on Needs Assessments, Monitoring and Evaluation, Designing and Facilitating Training, and Work Zones and Cross-Sector Collaboration.  They sound like boring subjects, and… well… they are, but they are something I’m interested in and have experience with.  I just hope I can make them interesting enough that the PCTs will pay attention.  It will be Weeks 3 and 4, so hopefully they will still be gun hoe enough that it gets through.  Either way they will have the materials to look through later.