Site Visit

Post by Lara

16 July 2012

We are on a visit to our site for 4 days to meet the PCV we are replacing as well as some community members, and gain a little footing in our community before we move here to stay in August.  We had guessed that we would be in a bigger village/town since there are two of us, and we were right. I don’t know the actual population size of the town, but it is the acting district capital and has 4 secondary schools and 6 primary schools, which means it is one of the larger communities in Salone that gets Peace Corps Volunteers.  One of our tasks on this visit is to view both of the houses prepared for us by our respective schools and choose which one we will live in (since they didn’t know they were getting a married couple until recently, the town prepared two separate residences to house their PCVs).  We are staying at the first house during our visit, and it is where the current volunteer lives. It is on the school grounds of my school, surrounded by 50-year-old mango, avocado, and plum trees which offer some much-appreciated shade.  It actually gets chilly here some nights, which is a welcome feeling for me.  

The house is also close to not one but two water pumps, and being on the school grounds it is removed from the regular hustle and bustle of the town.  The other house that was prepared is in town, in a much busier area. The one thing that it has over the first house is that it has an indoor bathroom (the first house has an indoor toilet but you have to walk outside to get to it). Still, we have basically fallen in love with the house on my school’s compound, so we’ve decided this is where we’ll be staying. 

While on our visit, the volunteer we are replacing made several yummy foods with us, including spaghetti and Alfredo sauce (made with Laughing Cow cheese!) with garlic toast, boiled sweet corn with margarine and salt, and a devil’s food cake with peanut butter frosting.  The cake was a veritable dream-come-true, and we basically lucked out trying to bake it over a coal pot. For whatever reason, it didn’t rise all that far (it was a 2-year-old cake mix—long story), so it was fudgy and dense, and the peanut butter frosting stayed warm and goopy, poured over top.  We have been planning to build an oven once we get to site, and this experience got us all that much more pumped to get our oven built once we move to site in August.

Another thing we noticed on our trip to site was that we really need to learn Mende.  In the market especially, Krio might be used to bargain prices, but beyond that everyone greets and chats and wants to know your life story in Mende, and all we know how to say right now is “hello,” “how are you?”, and “I thank God,” which functions as “fine” in Mende.  Kevin had a fun moment one day in town when we walked through with our principals and an elderly lady started talking to him in Mende. He ventured a guess at what she was saying and responded “I thank God,” at which point my principal started laughing and explained to Kevin that she had just said she is going to steal this man from his wife, and he had responded that he praises God.  Oh well- we’ve only had one week of class so far. We have a new motivation for taking our classes seriously now, namely that we don’t want to accidentally get a divorce or run into some other hitch just because we didn’t know what we were agreeing to! 

Overall, we loved our site visit and are now very excited to finish training and move to site in August. Kevin will be teaching math and physics at a technical and vocational secondary school, and I will be teaching math and chemistry at my secondary school.  I am a little worried about teaching chemistry, but I found out that there isn’t another chemistry teacher other than the current volunteer, and before he showed up there was no one even attempting to teach chemistry. I don’t necessarily feel that I’m qualified to teach chemistry, except that I am probably more qualified than no teacher at all.  It will certainly be a challenge, and if you know one thing about me it’s that I love a challenge.