so my three week span of internet access and phone service is about to come to an end as i am heading back to the village tomorrow. it has been a crazy couple of weeks. IST was GREAT in so many ways. i absolutely LOVE all of my volunteer friends, and am so sad that this is the last time we will all be together in one place until our COS (close of service) conference in 21 months. it would be impossible to gather a more interesting and diverse group of people in one place at one time. haha, well enough mushy-ness about how much i love my friends:) in other news, Agroforestry volunteers (me) had to stay three extra days at IST to have some intensive counterpart training/working together workshops. Just for a little background, agfo volunteers usually have some of the most confusing and/or strained relationships with their government counterparts because our work is sooo non-structured. each community is so different in terms of geography and agfo needs that it is really up to the volunteer to seek out his/her counterpart to do in depth site analysis to figure out the best plan of action for their specific area. Unlike Health volunteers, who have a set list of objectives and sensablilizations to give at their health centers, or Small Business Developement volunteers who are assigned an NGO (with an office) to work with throughout their service, Agfo volunteers have neither of these structural aids which might help give them any direction for their work. For example, i was assigned two counterparts, both the Chefs Adoints Cantonnement Forestiere in my village, which could be called deputy forestry chiefs. one is a woman and one is a man. the woman has her family in another village about 65 kms from my village and is often there for weeks at a time. the man (who has 3 wives), i get the feeling has a little uncertainty about me being a woman and in the first couple of months was definitely questioning my intelligence and/or worth as a worker. i saw him very rarely and he did not ever show any signs of taking me seriously. i decided that he would get the most out of the IST so i invited him to come to the counterpart sessions there. ohhhh boy was it useful. i could actually see the wheels turning in his head as a gave small group presentations and spoke to other volunteers counterparts about my village in french. at several points during the workshop he actually turned to me in disbelief and said "tu peut parler francais!" you can speak french. it was only then did i understand fully that in the beginning he had made some serious pre-judgements about me that had been hindering our relationship ever since (which, to be fair, im sure i have done/continue to do about him as well).
The actual content of these workshops also had a great impact on my understanding of the educational system here and how it affects/will affect my work here. the biggest thing i learned is that, unlike the united states, creativity is NOT stressed here in the classroom. instead, children learn the information through memorization alone. we had one activity where we split into groups of 3 counterparts and 3 volunteers each with the assignment of coming up with different sustainable ways to disperse information on agroforestry topics to stakeholders in the village. this was an easy assignement to us volunteers, who have grown up in a system of education where we are used to splitting up into groups and brainstorming ideas together. However, for our counterparts who are used to copying information off a board and memorizing it, the task proved to be a bit more challenging. I asked if any of them had any suggestions. One said a tree nursury. "no" i said, "we are looking for ways to disperse information, to tell people about something or how to do something, not that thing itself. For example, if you wanted to tell people about how to do a tree nursury, perhaps you could use the meathod of having a small group of people come to a meeting and teaching them, and assign each of them the task to go out to the village and teach 10 people each. this is sustainable because the small group of people now becomes the teacher when the volunteer leaves. now, do you have any examples of how to train people in a sustainable manner?" this question illicited a bunch of blank stares, and a couple of eye rolls from my fellow volunteers, one of whom when to get our APCD (associate pc director, in charge of the agfo sector) to re-explain the directions for the group work. after he explained and walked away again, one of my friends gave the example of having an experimental garden with a group of interested sustanance farmers to teach new agfo technologies with no one party losing too much if one fails. "can any of you come up with an example of one meathod to teach villagers like the two examples we have given?" more blank stares. one of the counterparts says "fuel saving mud stoves." at this point im really starting to get agitated. i walk over to the head of all agroforestry in the guinean government and ask if she could re-explain to our counterparts that we are not giving examples of agfo practices, but instead supposed to give creative ideas of how to teach these practices in a sustainable manner. after her explaination, i ask if the man who gave the mud stove example could perhaps come up with a way to teach the villagers how to build a mud stove. this was met with more confused looks. i felt like banging my head into a wall. i sighed and said "ok, if i wanted to teach the villagers how to build mud stoves in a way that they will remember and be able to teach to others, i might perhaps have a mud stove week, in the same way people recognize world aids day. throughout the week i might plan informational events, and demonstrations, offer free help if someone wanted to build a mud stove, and perhaps have the week culminate in a big fete where the villagers could come to eat food cooked on a mud stove. ok. now, can any of you think of one example of a new, innovative or creative way of dissiminating information among the villagers?" the counterparts do a miniature huddle and after a few minutes, one says "what about moringa." Moringa is a tree which we are supposed to promote for the nutritional value of its leaves. "do you see that column over there?" i ask. "if i wanted to get to that column, i could go over the table, around the table, under the table, i could hop around the table, i could pick up the table and push it aside, i could have a friend move the table for me, or i could grow wings and fly to the column. the question is not to give me different examples of the type of columns out there, it is to give me examples of MEATHODS OF GETTING TO THE COLUMN." this was my last attempt, and the counterparts finally did come up with an example we could work with. however, this sort of exhaustive learning process was the kind of thing repeated over and over through the last three days of IST, and although at some points i wanted to pull out my hair from frustration, i really believe it was the most productive three days i have had since i first got to my village.

another interesting thing i want to talk about a little bit. at the end of one of our sessions, the trainer who was flown in from washington to help us work through our difficulties with our counterparts split us into two groups- one for counterparts and one for volunteers. each group was asked to make a list of the most frustrating aspects of working with our counterparts (or for them, their volunteer), to this point. some notables from our list included "he sometimes shows up an hour late for meetings, and a couple times not at all," or "i have doubts about his motivation," or "he doesnt take my ideas or suggestions about potential agfo projects seriously." The counterpart's list went something like this: "my volunteer sometimes goes into their hut after work and shuts the door and doesnt want to socialize with us," or " my volunteer doesnt always want to go to babtisms with me" or "my volunteer spends too much time with children," or "my volunteer is not fluent yet in malinke/susu/pulaar (local languages)." at the end we got back together as a group and talked about the lists. one really interesting thing we noticed was that all the things on the volunteer list were work related, and all the things on the counterpart list were related to the social aspects of life. interesting. well, somehow we made it through, and on sunday got to go to a farm near the conference area which was really interesting. it was started by a man who wanted to use certain agricultural practices to increase his yields, and now makes more money through his farm than he does with his government job. one interesting practice i enjoyed learning about was that every year before he plants his rice he plants peanuts in that field, because peanut plants fix nitrogen and other nutrients in the soil, which makes his rice harvest better. my counterpart and i had a lot of time to walk around the farm and talk about things we saw and how or if we could incorporate those practices in banian. i raised the idea of an experimental field and wanted to know what my counterpart thought of getting together with a group of motivated farmers to work that land and try out new ideas in a low risk setting. anyway, he seemed really receptive to it, but we'll see how it goes when i return to site tomorrow and actually put into practice all that ive learned these past couple weeks. as always, i miss yall sooooo much! ill write more in july:)