Winding down and Buyoga-bound!

It's seemed like quite a long road, but my second go of Peace Corps "pre-service training" is drawing to a close. As they say in Mauritania, alhamdulillah -- thank God! I am appreciative of our training staff because it's sure not an easy task to build a Peace Corps program from scratch, and I don't envy their task. All things considered, I feel I've learned some useful and pertinent information, and I feel very ready to start this next chapter!

We closed out our TEFL training with a final all-day technical workshop that I helped to organize. I facilitated one of the sessions, on Community Content-Based Instruction or CCBI (I'd be happy to teach you about it, if you're interested!). Then last Friday, a full nine weeks into our ten-week training, we finally learned our site placements. Usually Peace Corps trainees find out about halfway through, but again since our program is new, they were still coordinating them until just recently.

My future home is called BUYOGA! I have not seen it before and probably will not get to until I actually move there just after Christmas. But I can tell you that it looks like it's about an hour from Kigali, with a motorcycle-taxi ride for some distance off the paved road. When I asked for details from one of the Peace Corps staff members who had visited this place, she gushed, "I LOVE your site!" She said the school has a lab with 15 computers and a brand new library with books donated from World Vision. They also have animal husbandry projects with pigs, rabbits, and cows (including five shipped over from Ireland!). I don't want to say too much more because some of it is still just rumors, but I'll be sure to give you a full run-down once I arrive and get settled in home sweet Buyoga!

The last training hurdle was on Saturday as we had our final language exam, which is an oral interview called the LPI. You have a conversation with a certified tester, and they give you a holistic score. The categories are Novice, Intermediate, and High (each broken into Low, Mid, and High), and then Superior is reserved for fluency of a native speaker.

I was surprised to find that, going into the test, I actually felt more prepared than I had before my LPI in Pulaar at the end of training in Mauritania. True, I was much more immersed in the language there, as I was living with a host family and had language class for about eight hours a day. Here we seemed to spend less time in formal class, but consequently I made more of an effort to study on my own. Plus I think that the second time learning a wildly different, non-Germanic/Romance language is just that much easier. Pulaar and Kinyarwanda have a few commonalities as far as their grammar goes.

Anyway, I took the LPI in the morning, and I felt like it went pretty well. I hadn't studied much per se because I had been reviewing a lot all through training. After lunch that day, our training director told me he wanted to see me in his office. I followed him in, and he told me to take a seat. He's a little bit of a prankster, so I couldn't tell if I should be worried or not. "I want to talk about your LPI," he said. "I am very surprised with the results." Surprised like bad? Did I do much worse than I had anticipated?

He then went on to tell me I had received a score of Advanced-High. I couldn't believe it! For the record, since our program is new we do not have testers who are officially certified in LPI, so this counts only as a mock assessment. But even so, I felt shocked and very humbled, not deserving of such a ranking. Perhaps it's because I threw in some good jokes? Like when I had to pretend I was in the market and I told the tester, "Umva, mucuruzi, ndi umuzungu ku ruhu, noneho gabanya." [Listen, vendor, I'm a white person only on the outside, so reduce your price to something fair.]

Final interviews and recommendations this week, and our swear-in will be this Saturday, December 19th, at the ambassador's residence. Photos to come, promise!