Tongan Take-aways : In-service Training

April 13, 2013

In-service Training was super great! It is always fun to get together all 15 of us and hear about everyone’s service. It seems like everyone is doing really great and having such a good time at site. It is also great to be able to get to see all of our staff, Peace Corps Tonga has such a great staff and because we are hounderds of miles away on Vava'u we only get to see them during trainings. Beside the fun of getting together, trainings are always a good time because they are on the main island (Tongatapu), which means there is a lot of good food that we can’t get at site (pretty much Chinese food and a café that serves iced coffees and cappuccinos). Basically training was six days of me gorging myself and drinking way too much caffeine. I also had a stomachache the whole time and we were all thinking that I might have a warm because of the massive quantities of food I was taking down (had the doc check me out and no worries she thinks I am fine, just over indulging).

The training was held at this beautiful and brand new catholic theological center run by a nun named Sister Katy who spoke Tongan, English and Italian on account of having to go there for nun stuff for a few years. I learned a lot during our 8 – 5 days and I am super excited to try new things in my classroom that will hopefully make me feel like my teaching is more focused and effective. We are also making a lot of head way on our project to help stream line the Tongan English curriculum and make it more user friendly for the teachers. We used the knowledge of our experience teachers in the group to get really relevant and useful information on teaching and classroom structure. Using trained professionals is not Peace Corps' strong point so I was really happy they learned from all of our previous evaluations and allowed those who know what they are doing to run the sessions.

Basically the days went like this: Chiara, Mandy and I do an early morning walk to get real coffee then we all load up the big Peace Corps van (which makes us all feel like we are a huge family going on vacation) and drive to the training site. First off, language class (which was great) followed by morning tea break- I can’t stress enough how rad tea times are; without a doubt one of the highlights of Peace Corps ( I wonder if other PC countries have tea times and if they are as good as ours?). After tea there was more training then a break for lunch cooked by the staff at the institute and it was always delicious. Back to training, second tea, more training then back to Sela’s guest house where most of us quickly dropped off stuff and changed and then hit up the café. Most of us would meet up for dinner at one of the few establishments that could accommodate a group of people and wasn’t a fried chicken place. Finally we would head back to Sela’s and discus general goings on until bed time.

By the time the second Saturday rolled around it was hard to say goodbye to everyone, especially the two on Eua, who all us Vava’u crew feel most close to, but it was also good to finally be going back to site after such a long break although the adjustment back to site isn’t a fun thing to look forward to. After spending so much time being stimulated and around people it is hard to come back to site where you are alone and not as much is going on. I am sure after a few days I will get back into the swing of things again. It is just hard to believe that we only have two more trainings left in our service, which means we will only see everyone as a group two more times before we leave Tonga.