Lindsey Wolf's Peace Corps Site
05.18.04 | I Start to Teach at Vo-Tech
Two things happened in the past week. First I had a very frustrating meeting with the other National AIDS Program volunteers and the effective leader of the support group, Tender Love and Care. It is the consensus that we cannot do much work with the group until the ARVs (HIV drugs) are available, and the date the drugs will supposedly arrive has been pushed back from June to July. (The group leader believes that clients need the incentive of either the drugs or free food to come to the meetings. Since the group has started and stopped meeting several times in the past, he wants to be prepared to start meetings and sustain the group.) My idea for a leadership and self-esteem building camp for the children of HIV-positive parents got rejected. Too much stigma, the group leader said. The group income generation project is not a priority right now, he said. Drugs are the priority. But I can't do anything about the drugs coming! Furthermore, a lot of organizational tasks need to be completed by the nurse in charge of the Voluntary Counseling and Testing program before we can begin. We also learned that she may be leaving the country in June, coinciding with the (new) projected start date for the program! But we are told "not to worry," that the program will start as planned. It is very frustrating to see tasks that I am easily capable of doing go undone because the person in charge isn't motivated to get things started. Also, because the NAP only has two staff members (the director and the nurse in charge of VCT), my assigned "boss" is the nursing supervisor in my region, who doesn't have any connection with the NAP. So, not unusually for a PCV, no one is directly responsible for me. So I have to go out looking for work on my own, which is what I did.
I am going to be teaching three weeks worth of classes to the highest form (3) at the Vieux Fort Technical School. The school is a new idea in St. Lucia - it is designed to teach technical skills to students who don't pass the common entrance examination to enter a secondary school. I started yesterday, with a class on Sexually Transmitted Infections. I was pretty nervous to teach a room full of 16 and 17 year old boys about STIs, especially since the teacher told me, "maybe they will listen to you because you're a new face." It was a bit of a struggle to get everyone to participate in the lesson, but afterward the teacher told me she thought it went very well. I taught another class this morning and have discovered that I enjoy teaching them. Hopefully they are taking something away from it. You should have seen how wide the first student's eyes got when I asked him to read the STI symptom he had been given (yellow-green or white discharge from the penis or vagina). Just helping them grow up (and recognize gonorrhea)!
Also coming up, I have two talks scheduled with different youth groups - one in Laborie and one in a community outside Vieux Fort. Actually, the one in Laborie was "rained out" yesterday. Lucians don't like to go anywhere in the rain. As the rainy season begins, I am wondering how that affects productivity...
