So, I feel that volunteers go through several stages in their service. The first is the “will I make it” stage, which starts before you even leave for the country, and lasts through training and the first couple of months at your work site. During those months, you enter the “I am useless” phase, where you believe that your fledgling language skills and lack of understanding of what the heck you are doing makes you a worthless bit of US government hardware. If you convince yourself that you can make yourself useful to the folks around you, then you enter the “why isn’t everything going the way I want it” phase, where you learn all the local intricacies of getting things done, and how the pace of things differs from what we are used to in the states. Once you have gotten all that under your belt, you enter the “I hope what I am doing is useful” phase, and the “oh my god, what am I going to do after this” phase. This can be intermixed with the “I will never get all of this accomplished” phase, or the “isn’t this over yet” phase, depending on your outlook on the world and how well you get along with the folks in your village.
There are of course many other mini phases and periods, such as the “do I really have to eat this” phase, and the “it’ll be warmer tomorrow” phase, but for now my brain is processing the experience in the aforementioned groupings.
Since the whole idea of Peace Corps is to essentially make itself obsolete, we are all kind of hoping that the programs we work with and the projects we initiate will be carried on. We always talk about sustainability of a project, and whether it will exist once the volunteer or ambitious local who started it moves on. In a way we are looking for a legacy. Not really a monument in our honor, or a plaque on the wall, but at least the feeling that everything you did won’t crumble to dust or be forgotten once you hop an airplane back to the states.
Thus I had a good shot to the gut today walking home with my assistant school director, somebody that I respect, trust, and consider a friend. She wasn’t being mean or cruel, just honest, exactly how a friend should be.
She had asked me about my host mother, who is also a teacher but works at the high school. I explained that she had lost many of her teaching hours because “Health Education” wasn’t being taught this year. She didn’t seem surprised by this at all, so I made the observation that probably most schools without PC volunteers were not teaching Health Education. She disagreed at first, but I countered by questioning if she though that it would have been taught at our school if I were not working there. She acquiesced to that point, nodding that most likely it wouldn’t have been added to the schedule without my presence. I decided to go a step further, and ask what she thought about next year, after my departure. Without missing a beat she said that the course would probably be dropped. We both immediately thought of my partner teacher, who of course will be without a job, and both remembered a conversation earlier that day where she joked about going to Moscow to look for work like so many other people from our village.
Those who have kept up with this blog since the beginning (all three of you), remember perhaps the last major shot in the gut we got for our program. “Life Skills Education” was made into a core subject last year, after much struggling and effort by PC volunteers and their partner teachers amongst a variety of players. Due to objections about some of the themes touched upon in the course it was struck from the list after about a month of classes. It was temporarily reclassified as optional while they decided what to do about things, but was dumped officially at the end of the year.
This year it was re-branded as “Health Education”, and again placed on the list of optional courses. We still don’t know what the fate of the course will be, but as there are no texts, no guide, and no curriculum, there really isn’t much for folks to object to.
I of course realized that the course would not be taught in every school as it was at the beginning of last school year, but I was hoping for a majority at least. The fact that it was dropped completely at our village high school I feel is somewhat telling though, as were my assistant director’s statements.
This brings me back to those “phases” I was talking about earlier. I had hit the “never get this all accomplished” point, but now am starting a backslide into the “I hope what I am doing is useful” phase.
I do realize that I may be overreacting a bit, but the combination of my own suspicions and a friend’s candid comments wrapped things up quite nicely. There is of course the chance of a huge policy reversal, or at least the chance that the schools we work with will continue to embrace the concept even after our departure.
It begs the question though of where to spend my time and effort. Do I throw myself into a program that I suspect is soon going to come to an unceremonious end, or do I focus on all the other bits that may lead to more long-lived results.
If this were a side project it would be an easy decision, but as it is my primary work responsibility it is something rather important. Not to mention that rampant alcoholism, a high percentage of teenage smokers, alarming human trafficking rates, and a blossoming of AIDS in eastern Europe all point to the necessity of giving the kids here a bit more education than they have been receiving.
Photo of the first bell ceremony at my school. 9th grader carrying a 1st grader through the crowd ringing the ceremonial "clopeĊ£el"
In support of fighting for the program I came here for, I have come up with two big things to keep me going. The first is the simple fact that health education has been in a state of limbo here for a number of years, and it’s acceptance has moved in fits and starts. This may just be another bump in the road. As my experience with transit here has taught me, you can survive bumps in the road, even big ones and really big ones. We never know what the next year will bring, and the better a program we can develop, and the more people we can train to do the job all the better.
Two, and this is a good catchall motivator for all my pursuits as an educator, is the fact that we don’t really ever know who we are teaching, and what they will grow up to be. So, for arguments sake, we say that health education goes out with a whimper next year. That basically means that the only effect my two years of teaching will have had will be the knowledge imparted to a couple hundred students. What if we argue even further, and say that one of our classes prevented a young girl from getting trafficked, or prevented some kids from getting AIDS in their college years. You can even fantasize that one of your kids will grow up to be the next Thomas Edison, Madelyn Albright, or Gandhi. I mean, somebody was Einstein’s math teacher in grade school. Maybe you aren’t the person that gives such a person whatever it is that makes them so special, but if a first aid lesson inspires a kid to dream about med school, then all the better.
Some might think this is a bit absurd, but I guess it falls into the philosophy of doing the best you can because you never know what the effect may be. Nothing ever got accomplished without trying, so I guess we should give it a go this year and hope for the best. At the very least I will have fun (be embarrassed) again trying to teach 7th grade girls about puberty without the proper pronunciation and vocabulary.
