Northern Volunteer Conference

After 3 months at site, life has become pretty routine: I go to the nursing school from 8:30-4:30, Monday through Friday.  As of January, I'm only teaching 1 class per week because the students are doing more shifts on the hospital wards.  When I'm not teaching, I'm researching sociology/psychology in Uganda, management/healthcare in Uganda, and creating lesson plans.  I'm really working 40 hours a week (because I research at home on the internet too).  And I'm also trying to create the databases for the school office, but the lesson plans have to be done first.  (Once they are completed, I can use them over & over for each new set of students.)  It's just A LOT of work to do RIGHT NOW.

My weekends are spent riding my bike to town, shopping in the market, hanging out with the PCVs in Arua, washing my clothes, cooking at home, and watching movies/reading books. 

Everyone says the Peace Corps experience is what you make of it.  And if (the paragraph above) was the outlook for the next 2 years, I would be kind of disappointed (and this blog would get very boring).  Last week I went to the volunteer conference, in hope that I would find a secondary project to get more involved in the community and enhance my Peace Corps experience.

There were about 25 volunteers from the northern regions at the conference (many from my training group).  But there were also several volunteers who are close to the end of their service and I found their stories/advice the most useful.  We discussed a variety of potential side projects, e.g. grant writing, literacy programs, village savings & loan associations, soap making, working in post-war conflict areas, health education for women, and more.  It was interesting to hear the stories of PCVs who were not successful at their primary assignment but had their secondary project take off and is completely sustainable now.  There was a community health volunteer (with no financial background) who started nine savings & loan groups in her village – it was inspiring to know that I don’t have to be an expert to be successful.  I haven’t committed 100% to any projects yet, but I'm leaning towards participating in sessions for women empowerment and working in post-war conflict areas (trauma healing).  And I can tell you that I’m much more excited about those projects than creating databases (even though the databases are definitely needed at the nursing school, it’s not very engaging).

Towards the end of the three-day conference, we were all getting kind of burned out from the sessions and opted for a game of softball on the last evening.  :)