The Past 2 Weeks

Hello All!

Sorry for the over 2 weeks of silence. It’s been quite busy now that we are at the tail-end of training. In less than a week, I will be sworn in as a real Peace Corps Volunteer and I couldn’t be more ecstatic about it! Right from swear-in, we go to our sites. I can’t believe it’s actually happening.

So what have I been doing for the last two weeks? Well, I’ll start from this week and then work backwards.

This week was a really important week because, in our language groups, we were given a village within our commune in which we had to do an assessment of some sort, and from those results, plan an activity. Our assessment was on Monday, and I think it went really well, especially since we had to do the entire thing in Khmer. We did something called “appreciative inquiry,” which is when you ask positively-spun questions in order to get people to think positively, and from that, we led into “priority ranking,” which is an assessment method that plays out exactly like the title sounds: people rank their priorities, and whichever comes out most important is what we would then proceed to work on. While the people who came to the assessment know about the overall food groups, they chose to rank “Vitamins within Foods” as their top need.

From that information, we set up a time to work with our Village Counterpart, and started the planning process. We had done the assessment without one of our members because she had gotten really ill, but as we were planning, she was getting better, so we decided to have 4 stations for the people to go around to: 1 kids station & 3 stations having to do with nutrition. Those “adult” stations were the cooking and cleaning of vegetables to keep the most nutrients in (my station), the actual vitamins within the vegetables, and what the vitamins do for the body. Our activity was yesterday and I think we did really well. We had six people and 11 children show up, despite the downpour that came through within the first 20 minutes of our activity.

The women who came to the session were really awesome in that they gave us feedback after our activity was over, since they were waiting for the rain to pass before they left. They said my Khmer pronunciation has gotten better since Monday. I’m really glad they said that since that’s been one of my biggest issues with the language so far.

So that’s what we did this week. To start off the week, though, we had a wonderfully relaxing morning at a nearby lake, and then climbed almost 400 stairs on our way to the top of a mountain. This was on Sunday, and it was the perfect way to relax before our big project week.

Oh, I forgot to mention, this week, on Wednesday, we found out where each of us would be living for the next 2 years. I will be in Koh Kong province, which is apparently absolutely gorgeous. I’m so excited to begin my work!

There isn’t really much to tell from before this past week. We did some other community activities and had a lot of training and language, but other than that, not much sticks out in my mind, other than the fact that we taught a nutrition class completely in Khmer and we had a day where we had a bunch of activities for the kids in the area to learn about hand-washing. My group’s nutrition class focused on the 3 food groups and healthy vs. unhealthy food, while I was at the coloring station for the activity with the children.

All in all, I’m really excited for the coming week!