Arrival of Group 3

Last week I was invited to Assela to help with the Training of Trainers for Peace Corps’s third group of trainees.  Assela is located about 4 hours southeast of the capital, and it is where most of the Ethiopian runners train because of its elevation.  This was the third, and last week of the training to prepare the Ethiopian trainers.  You see, Amharic is not commonly taught as a second language to foreigners, and Ethiopian teaching methods consist of mainly writing lists of words on a chalkboard to be copied.  So, we had a lot of work to do to prepare the teachers!

Only 4 of the 14 teachers were returning from my group of training, but at least some of them had experience with Peace Corps previously.  One other volunteer and myself taught a few sessions on interactive teaching methods, and we listened to each teacher give a micro-lesson.  Overall it was a fun week getting to know the trainers, not to mention a week of hot showers and eating out!

The most exciting part of the week was actually my last hour and a half in Assela; it was what we had been preparing the teachers for all week: the arrival of group 3!  Since I was leaving early Sunday morning on a bus back to Dangila, I had to be in Addis, the capital, Saturday night, which means I had to leave Assela by around 3pm.  Since the volunteers didn’t arrive for the lunch program until 1:30pm, it was a very brief meeting, but exciting nonetheless.  It was so fun for me to be on the other side of things.  I have been there, I know the anxiety leading up to meeting your host family, I know the pressure of having to learn this difficult language, and I know the awkwardness of trying to understand this culture.  I have great memories of those events from last winter and I have grown so much in the past 10 months, but I don’t envy them.  I had a great experience, but I’m so glad that I’m past that.  Life if so vastly different at site than it is during training, and meeting the new group was a great reminder of how far I’ve come.

In November I will get to meet the volunteers placed near me when they visit for their site visit, and in December I get to spend another week in Assela helping with training, just before they are sworn-in as volunteers.  It is exciting to have 40 new Americans in-country!