Shadowing Week

Shadowing is an integral part of Pre-Service Training (PST). Shadowing occurs halfway through the two-month PST, and is when a trainee “shadows” a current volunteer at his or her site, giving trainees an opportunity to experience what a volunteer does at his or her post.

I shadowed a Bots ’11 volunteer named Rachel Ecklund, a Life Skills volunteer in Morwamosu. Morwamosu is about four hours west of Gabarone, in southern Botswana. Morwamosu is in the “bush,” and is a tiny village. Rachel lives in a traditional, round, one-room house.  She has electricity, but no running water. Rachel gets her water from a tap in her yard. The tap doesn’t always have running water, so she has to store water in large bins in her house in case she doesn’t have water for several days.  She uses a pit latrine in her yard to go to the bathroom. Not having running water can be challenging. Washing dishes certainly takes a lot longer, and bathing involves a very large bucket!

In the Peace Corps, each volunteer is given an assignment area designation that they will work in for their two years of service. There are four designations: Life Skills, NGO, Local Government Capacity Building (LGCB), and Clinical Health Team (CHT). Life Skills volunteers work with primary, junior and senior secondary schools. Life Skills volunteers work with students to help promote healthy lifestyles, with an emphasis on life skills such as creating self esteem and a positive identity, goal setting, and decision making. One such tool for promoting these types of goals is through a program called PACT. While I was shadowing with Rachel, I had the privilege in sitting in on a PACT meeting she held for the children at her school. PACT stands for Peer Approach to Counseling Teens. During the meeting they discussed ways they could be positive role models and allies for their peers when faced with pressures to participate in unhealthy activities (such as drinking alcohol or having unprotected sex), which can increase the likelihood of contracting Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs), or HIV/AIDs.

Rachel is leaving in early October, so her service is almost over. Her last project before she leaves her site is creating a world map on one of the walls of her school, Morwamosu Primary School. The map will be incredibly beneficial to the children of the school, because they can use it as a reference point for their studies. The few days that I spent with Rachel, we spent at the school, painting the countries with the school children. The children paid incredible attention to detail when they were painting and were proud of the work they did coloring in the countries. 

The wall with dots painted on the countries for the children to color in.

Peace Corps Volunteers helping the children paint in the countries.

A semi-finished world map!

I loved shadowing week. A major highlight was the food! Rachel is great cook, and I learned how to make green curry, peanut thai curry and gluten free taco shells from scratch! Peace Corps provide volunteers with a cookbook while they are at site, and we used a lot of recipes from it. In addition to eating some great food, shadowing gave me a chance to talk to Rachel and ask her all of the questions I had about the successes and challenges of her service, staying connected with family and friends back in America, and traveling around southern Africa. Shadowing was a perfect vacation from the daily stresses of PST, and it left me feeling refreshed and excited about the rest of PST and my service.

Site announcements are next week, so I will keep you all posted of where I will be stationed, and the organization I will be working with. Thank you for all the positive feedback regarding my blog posts, and I hope you keep on reading and following along in this journey with me!