Having reached the half way point of my third year as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Botswana, I am dismayed to find myself on an exit stance. Instead of reveling in my project's accomplishments thus far, I am more and more doing busy work to while away my remaining months in country.
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| Botswana Volunteers including moi celebrating 50 Years of Peace Corps, 2011 |
The first twenty seven months of this tour, I was a pawn, a willing pawn. They, Peace Corps, originally said I was going to Eastern Europe and I cried but I agreed. Fortunately, my medical issues made me miss that opportunity. Then they said 'Botswana' and I cheered because Africa is always where I saw myself doing Peace Corps. And so I came to Botswana. Once here, and after two months of pre-service training (PST, that I was one of the few to consider a really good experience), they sent me to Moshupa, the village where I spent the next two years.
I went were they sent me and did what they sent me there to do, to the best of my ability, a cooperative pawn. I asked for a primary school and of course they gave me a senior then junior secondary. But, I, the pawn, made the most of it and for the most part, it was quite wonderful. But, then came the chance to extend.
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Teaching at the senior secondary school in Moshupa
while being shadowed by a new PC trainee, Terri Lundy, 2012 |
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| Cultural Day at the College, teaching the Electric Slide, 2014 |
They told me I could design my third year, propose what I wanted to do, identify who I wanted to do it with and how, they being PC Botswana, and I believed them. I applied to extend as well as to be a PCVL, a Peace Corps Volunteer Leader. It was my chance to shed my pawnship and become the Queen in this chess game. I proposed to do something very specific, curriculum development at a teaching college, using materials developed and in use by the EDC, Education Development Centre. I proposed to work with the EDC as my host organization, to bring a modified version of their materials to colleges to teach future teachers how to effectively bring Life Skills to the classroom, identified as critical to stemming the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Botswana.
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| I get to appear on Btv (Botswana television) show Talk Back, 2013 |
My application to extend, which included this proposal, was accepted, approved with one requested change. Instead of moving to Gaborone, the capital where EDC is headquartered, I agreed to be placed at a college with the caveat that I would still work with EDC to develop the curriculum and see it piloted at the teaching college. Oh, and there was no response at all to my applying to be a PCVL. That probably should have clued me into just how thoroughly my application was read.
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| Judge at a pageant at the College |
So I moved to a new village, Serowe, and reported for my new assignment at the Serowe College of Education (SCE). About one month into my third year, (that did not have an auspicious beginning - my original counterpart at SCE was out on sick leave from the time I arrived and no one had read my proposal and no one knew what to do with me; I did not like my new home, where it was located and having found the landlady less than respectful or honest; the amenities I had become used to in Moshupa simply didn't exist here for me), the Principal of the College determined that I could not do what I stayed here to do! Well, damn. I was one unhappy camper.
Two weeks from going home to the States for a mandatory month, I was deep in discussion with my Program Manager about how to resolve this, when he informed me that instead of PC doing all it could do to get me where I COULD do what I stayed to do, what they had approved nine months before, PC had already decided, without discussing it with me, that the priority was to 'exhaust every possible way to keep me in Serowe'. That was frankly regardless of what this unilateral decision meant to my project and or my third year of service. Instead of being the Queen I was effectively being returned to pawn status to satisfy a political agenda between Peace Corps and the Ministry of Education, my host organization. I found that EDC had not even been approached about my proposal and had no idea of what I had hoped to do with their help and materials. The nightmare that has dominated my third year began.
TO BE CONTINUED
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The English Club Dance Party
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