While I got exhausted from the long days of travel to Dangriga, I often reminded myself how fortunate I was to get to view this beautiful scenery and countryside and live and work in such a wonderful place
The actual day-to-day work of a technical trainer is really busy. It involves a lot of travel, facilitating sessions, one-on-one check-ins with trainees, serving as a coach, guide, mentor, counselor, advisor, etc to trainees and LCFs at times, and networking with community partners to arrange experiential learning opportunities. Not to mention trying to take care of my other programming responsibilities in working with current volunteers and ongoing projects and activities. “Never a dull moment,” as Ms. Gillett often says at Trinity!
I’m not complaining, because I love training. For me, it’s like the best of education – I don’t miss serving as a classroom teacher, but I love being able to help people reach their goals and find their personal best and I have found that through leadership development and training activities, this is where I am most effective and happy!
PCVs anxiously await to cheer for the trainees and welcome them to Belize
The PC Belize Trainee Class of 2010
So, onto training. The excitement builds as we prepare for the arrival day of the trainees. The days leading up to arrival are filled with final preparations of the office, trainee binders, schedules, and logistical details (something else I love working on – I admit that’s odd, but I am really strongly left brained when it comes to logistics!). The day of arrival is filled with anticipation. In 2009, the trainees came in the morning, so we all got on the road and met them at the airport with a huge greeting crew of volunteers and headed out to lunch, afterward, we held welcome activities in the office. This time around, the flight came in from Dallas late in the afternoon, so we just waited anxiously all day to leave and then traveled out on a chartered school bus with a huge crew of volunteers to greet the trainees. It’s always fun to cheer as the trainees disembark (I wish we’d had such a greeting, it really means a lot to the trainees!) and to see their eager and excited faces as they land in their new home for the next 26 months (or maybe longer as in Anthony and my cases). It was then back to Belmopan for dinner and settling into the hotel.
Staff role-playing CBT life: here we are the PCTs talking about our full bellies from such a big mid-day meal
Next on the agenda is a week-and-a-half center-based office training. The trainees stay in Belmopan and come into the office every day for core sessions on topics all volunteers need. We also take them out on Culture Day (in 2009 it was Maya and Mestizo with a trip out to Benque for presentations and a delicious meal and a tour of Xunantunich; in 2010 we explored Kriol culture with a trip to the Community Baboon Sanctuary and another delicious meal and presentations) and have some general recreation with swimming at the river and kickball at the park. I am not as active in the general sessions unless we do some role plays about life as a trainee and development work and community assessment. It’s not until we begin explaining the assessment process for trainees that I come in and meet my group and review their learning objectives.
Friendly spider monkeys interact with trainees at the Community Baboon Sanctuary
The famous Mr. Peters and his Boom and Chime band perform
A demonstration of sweating rice - they clean it with this process of flipping it - amazing!
On the second-to-last day of this center-based training, we reveal the language groups for the trainees with a game of Jeopardy. It’s a fun way to get some information about what CBT will be like and to have the trainees work to get the information about their training site.
On the next day, I held my welcome session in which we got to know each other and talked about the many activities we’ll participate in as a group. This time I made a fun game called “The Game of CBT Life” including a homemade die; by playing the game, trainees got cards that told all of our training activities. It was a lot of fun! We also took a learning styles inventory and talked about the training method we follow for PC Belize so they would be prepared for the types of activities (and FUN) we’d have in all our sessions together. An activity I always do, which I took straight from my own training, is to have us all draw a picture of our path to PC – we learn a lot about each other and it helps me see what motivated them to be here.
Following the session, everyone takes a lunch break and then we load up the vehicles and everyone heads out to their first host family and their CBT home. It’s fun to see everyone saying their goodbyes and sending each other off. In 2009, for some reason I was not assigned to drop off, so after everyone left it was eerily quiet and I just waited to hear how the drop-offs went; this time, I drove some youth folks to Georgeville and enjoyed chatting with them as they showed some of their anxiety through their many, many questions. I did my best to allay any concerns and assure them we work hard to find good families. It was fun to connect trainees to host moms and leave them to get to know each other.
This time around, we dropped off the trainees on the Thursday before Easter. Being this is a Christian country which observes Easter with a four-day holiday, we could not hold any training activities during that entire weekend, so we saw it as a cultural exchange time. Trainees were nervous, but when I saw them the following Tuesday all survived and enjoyed themselves and learned some new strategies for making connections with their Belizean hosts (even when dealing with language barriers).
Next up, CBT!
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