Dietrich's Training journal |
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StagingJuly 5, 2003Flew to Miami to meet up with my new training group. Was intending to make careful note of everyone for future reference, and to try to type them, i.e. to figure out who was the chatterbox of the group, the question-asker, etc. When I got into the conference room I was amazed at the number of people and when I heard to my amazement that they were all bound for Jamaica I mostly gave up on paying attention to individuals. I made note of one woman who said that when she was in PC in Africa she would respond to little kids who called her "la blanche" with "bonjour, les petits noirs." I made a point of meeting her. Her name is Andrea and it turns out she was med. evac-ed from Gabon after 6 months there. When we went to the airport to depart for Kingston I found myself helping a Haitian guy get through the security screening. He didn't understand english well at all, so I told him what the security lady said in French. I found that French didn't come out so easily anymore. Arrived in Kingston to a really calm airport scene, unlike the scene when we arrived in Abidjan. Went to the University of West Indies and did sessions a couple days before being split into our different sectors and taken to out training sites. TrainingGot stuck in traffic from Kingston to Old Harbour Bay. The trip took like 4 hours. We met our host families and went "home" for the night. Apart from the facets of living with a host family, playing marbles, dominoes and cricket with extended family children, getting to know people in the community, fellow trainees, and becoming familiar with Jamaican food, training was a bust. Thank god it was only 7 weeks. All aspects of training were poor quality, we spent a lot of time waiting for staff members to show up and we did no substantive technical training except for field trips (where we did some work) and a one hour class session on one particular day. One of the field trips was to Seaford town, where we did some construction of a soak away style pit latrine and repair of a water catchment tank. Another one of the field trips was a party at a PC house in Port Royal. One of my friends got violently ill after drinking too much and plastered the whole side of the bus while hanging her head out the window on the way back to the training center. Afterward we were told that the staff had it all planned out, that we were put in a safe environment where we could "test our limits" and interact with current PCVs and that they would get feedback through the PCVs about how we thought training was going. Yeah, right. I lived with the Lloyd family, including Aunt Tilda , Rose and Marcellus. Swearing inWe swore in and I was to be picked up by my agency and transported to my site, but there was a strike in progress and I wound up getting a ride in a PC vehicle, rather than an agency one. Clearly I was coming into the organization at a weird time.AssignmentMy assignment is to work with WPM Waste Management Ltd., the western division of the National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA), based in Montego Bay (Mo Bay).Links to |
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