Volunteer Projects

I’ve gotten a lot of questions about what the actual job of a Peace Corps Volunteer entails. Well, it’s not exactly a 9 to 5.

As you may know, the Peace Corps Mission is threefold: the first is to providing training to interested men and women in host communities. The second is to share America with your host community, and the third is to share your host community with America.

Over the last five months (five months?! what?!) I’ve been doing a lot of goals two and three. As a single young woman in two heavily Muslim countries, I spent a lot of time explaining how yes, I was choosing not to marry or have children. I talked with many Nigeriens about how Americans value education and independence, particularly for girls and young women. Sometimes they believed me, sometimes they didn’t… sai hankuri.

Through this blog, I try to share little pieces of where I am with anyone who might be interested back home… and elsewhere around the world according to my blog tracker!

I’ve also been fortunate enough to be a part of the World Wide Schools Program, where I exchange letters with American classrooms. I paired up with my friend Elie, who is teaching high school social studies in Saint Louis, Missouri through Teach for America. Shout out to Sumner High School!! Although the mail system has made our exchanges rather limited so far, it’s a lot of fun for me.

I am anxious to get down to work in the more traditional sense. I have nothing to report as of yet, but I would like to share some projects other PCVs have worked that I find particularly inspiring. These projects are incredibly exciting and also great examples of what many PCVs work towards: acting as a facilitator, and being a small part of big changes.  

Midwife Training. Maternal health is one of the most critical problems in Niger, the country with the highest maternal mortality in the world. Most women who die in childbirth do so because of a lack of medical attention.

In Niger, a PCV conducted training for twelve local midwives in Kore Hausa and the surrounding villages. As I understood it, she selected dedicated women who were well respected and already worked as traditional midwives in the community. The volunteer facilitated training sessions that taught the midwives to deliver babies in a safe and healthy manner. The women were trained to detect warning signs during pregnancy that might complicate childbirth, and to encourage mothers to visit the local health centers. I met one of the midwives in Kore Hausa, and after telling me how she took women to the health center for prenatal exams and at the time of delivery; she proudly displayed her training completion certificate.

Literature for ESL Students. English language is becoming increasingly important in Rwanda. It is now the primary language of the education system and becoming so for all other public offices. Still, the number of trained English teachers is low.

An education volunteer in Rwanda recently told me about a literature project she’s working on. When she realized her students were eager to read English novels, but were having trouble with the vocabulary, she was inspired. This PCV, who is well over the age of retirement, has been rewriting The Last of the Mohicans for English as a Second Language classes. With her students, she condenses the text, one chapter at a time, “without dumb-ing it down, keeping all the action and the juice”. As they write, she and her students are also compiling a dictionary of all the difficult words and writing simple English definitions. When the project is finished she’s hoping to get it published for her school and ESL classes elsewhere.