PC Blog 6: A Day of Pre-Service Training for Salone 10

Note: This blog entry was first posted on Sunday, February 19 and updated on Sunday, April 23. I apologize for the large delay since the last blog post, due to a variety of reasons. Hopefully more entries (which I have already planned) will come much sooner!

Simple map of Sierra Leone and neighboring Guinea, highlighting Kambia and several other cities also mentioned here.

Kambia

The majority of our eleven weeks of Pre-Service Training (10 out of 11 weeks, in fact) were spent at the Peace Corps Training Site situated in the northwest of Sierra Leone in a mid-sized city called Kambia. It's about halfway between the capital, Freetown, and neighboring Guinea's capital, Conakry, so it's very much a crossroads kind of town, with a lot of trade and transportation business between people of both countries. Kambia is also situated along the banks of a major river, the Greater Scarcies, so fishing and trade from the river is also a major component of its local economy.

The Training Site

Our Training Manager, who has been with Peace Corps Sierra Leone for nearly ten years, told me that the Peace Corps moves their designated training site to different cities around the country every five years or so, to help benefit different areas. Prior to the pandemic, the training site was at Port Loko, which is about halfway between Kambia and Freetown, so the Peace Corps staff used the intervening two "pandemic years" without volunteers to select and *start* to prepare the new site for us at Kambia. I say *start* because the training site was constantly being worked on while we were there (especially during the last week before our swearing-in ceremony, but that's still several blog posts away).

Part of the Training Compound showing the outdoor veranda. This photo was taken much later, after steps for "beautification" had been completed, including a fresh coat of paint. The trainees meticulously painted the flags and Peace Corps logo over several days.

The training site compound itself consists of one main building with a large, open meeting space (complete with stage), a smaller indoor storage building with attached outdoor porch (in Sierra Leone, they call this a “veranda”), a small generator building (complete with large petrol-powered generator), and three outdoor pit latrines (there are also three flush toilets inside the main building, but they strongly encouraged compelled us to use the latrines to help us "acclimate" to the lavatory culture of Sierra Leone). Outside, there are a few trees and even some landscaping that was gradually added to and improved throughout the summer. The whole compound is surrounded by a rather thick concrete wall, tipped with barbed wire. At first, this seemed a little strange to me: one of the main compounds of an organization promoting peace and community-building, cordoning itself off with an imposing wall reminiscent of a US prison building, but it turns out that this style of fencing is very common in Salone for security, not just for government or other organization buildings, but also many larger households. These are often even crowned with broken glass and barbed wire as an extra deterrent to climbing. Accordingly, with this increased security, several guards are stationed 24/7 to man the gate and inspect the premises, and so there is also a small guardhouse on the grounds for them.

A Day of Training

During training, we would spend about half of our days at the Training Site, with the other half at our Community Technical Training Site (it was called something like this - I forget the exact term the PC gave it…). Basically, for Education Volunteers: a nearby junior secondary school, for Health Volunteers: a slightly further away health clinic. I’ll talk more about the Education trainees’ time at the school in another entry, but on days we’d spend together with the Health trainees at the Training Site, we were bussed over from our hotel at 8AM through the center of Kambia, past the bustling markets and lorry park, the people washing their bikes in the river, and the waving children happily shouting, “Oputo!” to us, to the training site on the other end of town. Most of our sessions were conducted sans-electricity, but on the few occasions when we’d need PowerPoint for our session, they’d turn on the generator, but god-forbid we’d need to use the WiFi for a session because the single connection simply could not handle all of us at the same time (I found it was actually faster to use the 4G mobile network directly from my phone, which was actually surprisingly good in Kambia).

The Peace Corps loved to get the trainees involved in the sessions, usually by dividing into discussion groups and then presenting to the whole cohort. That's me on the right listening intently while I definitely am not picking my nose. Photo courtesy of Peace Corps Sierra Leone.

About half of our sessions were for language learning (especially toward the beginning of our training when they’d pack in 2 or 3 language lessons a day), so we’d trundle outside (as long as it wasn’t raining) into small groups of 3 or 4 with our chairs and a small blackboard easel to learn all about the local lingua franca, called Krio, which is a fascinating English-based Creole language that I’ll talk much more about in a future post.

The other half of our sessions at the Training Compound were split between lessons on Medical information (though we’d already finished more than half of these during our first week sequestered at the hotel in Lungi), Safety & Security (where we learned about RADAR, which stands for… something…), and “Core” training which was mostly about stuff related to Peace Corps, like Reporting, Community Assessment Tools, and Project Frameworks, or else about Sierra Leone itself, often led by guest speakers, including: a session on Salone history and government led by a professor from Port Loko, a session about Kambia led by the Paramount Chief himself, and a session on Secret Societies and the effects of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) led by a local NGO, which as you might expect was very emotional.

Half-way through the day, a truck from a local restaurant would come bearing lunch, which was always a traditional Salonean dish, usually rice with some sort of sauce (which they call “plasa” or “soup”, depending on if it included shredded leaves) and ⅘ times would include a whole fish. Needless to say, we got pretty good at eating fish armed with only a spoon and our wits, learning quickly how to pick through the bones so they wouldn’t poke the roof of our mouths as we carefully chewed.

After our lessons throughout the morning and afternoon, we’d be loaded back onto the bus around 5 or 5:30 to head back to the hotel for a short break before dinner at 7, upon which we’d all gather back onto the bus to be taken to a different Guest House (hotel), which was owned by our lunch caterer, where we’d get our eventime chop. Unlike lunch, this was often more of a fusion of Salonean and more Western-style food. It was usually pretty good, but always a surprise, as we’d wait to find out what that day’s unique meal would be, always hoping for chicken (we got quite a lot of fish here, too). The atmosphere here was generally pretty chill and relaxing (until they’d crank up the music in the bar area for an impromptu dance party) and I think we all enjoyed getting to come here in the evenings to unwind, especially getting to talk with the owner/head chef who was always enthusiastic and happy to see us. After awhile of convincing everyone it was time to leave (which could take some time), we’d all trundle back onto the bus one last time for our final trip back to the hotel, often with music blasting (usually provided by one of our excellent drivers, though occasionally fought over by one of the other trainees for the privilege). By the time we’d get back, the electricity would have been switched on (it was limited to 7PM to 7AM, which was better than most of the rest of Kambia, which had NO central electrical system), so trainees would often hang around for an hour or two more together before finally heading off to bed.

Ultimately, though the sessions could be rather long, the days a bit hot, and the meals a tad too fishy, I think we all genuinely enjoyed our time living and learning together in Kambia over the summer. In future posts, I’ll outline a few additional aspects of training, such as the Language and Technical training sessions.

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Disclaimer: About our Living Conditions

Because of enhanced COVID-precautions, several aspects of our training experience were quite different to what was typically done pre-pandemic. The impression I get was that subsequent groups will return to something closer to the previous system and so I don’t want to give a false impression to any prospective invitees as to the living conditions you might expect during training. As such, I wanted to outline some of the differences and their pros and cons.

My hotel room during Pre-Service Training. The nightly electricity gave me enough light to take this photo!

As I mentioned before, the major difference was that instead of staying with our individual local “host families”, we were all housed together at a small hotel (which was pretty nice for Salonean standards). Accordingly, instead of traveling to and from our training sites individually on bikes, we would typically be transported all together on the fancy new Peace Corps bus (which was also more feasible for our group due to our much smaller size). Similarly, all three daily meals were provided for us, either by our hotel or a caterer, rather than from our host families. The main benefit to this is that, because of all of our extra time together outside of the designated training sessions, our group became very close with each other (as well as with the PC staff, who also mostly stayed at the hotel or Guest House where we ate dinner). This was also in part due to our much smaller cohort, which was at most half the size of a more typical pre-pandemic group. Additionally, we were afforded several “luxuries” which we wouldn’t typically have staying at most host families, including running water, nightly electricity, and the occasional more Western-style dish for dinner.

On the flip side, we spent much less time with our host families and thus also had less time for language and cultural integration outside of sessions (from living with our host families). Furthermore, though our weekends were free from lessons, this was the only time we could actually go to be with our host families, so we were forced encouraged to spend virtually the entire day with them, which left virtually no down-time during our entire training period (wheras if we stayed with the host families every day, we wouldn’t have to force all of our “integration” time into the weekends and could spend more time unwinding and relaxing on Saturdays and Sundays). I’ll spend more time in a future entry discussing our time with our host families, but ultimately, this much diminished interaction with them was the only real detriment we experienced during training due to COVID (apart from COVID itself - and that’s some promised foreshadowing if I’ve ever seen it!)