Post=IST
Trip Start
Nov 02, 2003
1
39
70
Trip End
Feb 14, 2006
Antananarivo,
Madagascar
Saturday, May 15, 2004
The training itself was "eo ho eo" (so=so.) There was a good session about national AIDS education programs (the acronym for which is PMPS or "pimps"!) and one by another volunteer about "Life Skills" (kind of a combination of AIDS ed and character-building) training in schools. All volunteers had the opportunity to run their own sessions, and I led what I thought was a great discussion among volunteers with urban sites. The main problem, we concluded, was that PC trains us to work in very rural areas, using tactics like walking around and telling groups of women shucking rice about malaria prevention. Therefore, we all feel more comfortable leaving our urban sites to go out to the countryside to do the work we were trained for, but have no transportation (urban health workers who do go travel by motorcycle, which we're not allowed to do) and no means of introduction to the people there (very important in Malagasy culture.) We decided that we should either be trained to work in our urban sites, even as one of 40 health workers in my case or as one of 200 in the case of my friend, or put in rural areas. Hopefully Peace Corps will take our thoughts into consideration.
The rest of the sessions, though, ranged from boring to pointless all the way to insulting. We had a session described on the schedule as "collaboration with NGOs," something we're all dying to learn about, that ended up being about how to use counseling cards. These are laminated papers with pictures of healthy activities (handwashing, breast-feeding, etc) on one side and a sample speech about the topic in Malagasy on the other. A woman from an NGO we all want to work with spent an hour telling us how to use the cards - which is completely self-explanatory and something most of us have already been doing at site. It really felt demeaning for her to tell us, all college graduates, essentially, "This is a counseling card. There is a picture on one side and words on the other" for an hour. Finally I asked if we were going to be discussing collaboration with her NGO, and the health program assistant told us that the session was not "about" collaboration but "was" collaboration itself since the NGO rep was teaching us. Argh. Other sessions just took us through the structures of the national health administration, which is completely irrevelant to our work.
There were also problems with the staff. The health program director is a very nice and accomplished woman (one of the first female surgeons in Mcar and the wife of the health minister), but really doesn't know how to deal with people or lead our program effectively. Peace Corps' Inspector General just came through and evaluated the Mcar program and she took all his comments (things like, "the health program should have more structure") extremely personally. In fact, our only session with her before she left for China in the middle of the in-service (which was totally irresponsible in itself) was her angrily, almostly tearfully, defending herself to us and proposing inane "quick-fix tactics" to respond to the Inspector's comments. It brought the PCVs' frustration to the boiling point; I would not be at all surprised if there are major staff changes soon.
On the more positive side, I seem to be above average in terms of the work I've been doing, which feels good; I've been giving presentations at the hospital and the nutrition NGO every weekday, and some people haven't started yet. (Of course it's not a competition, especially since many people have such different dialects that they've had to learn a whole new language at site, but it still feels good.) We had to give a sample presentation to the language trainers so they could make sure our language is okay, and I passed with flying colors. I also got some great ideas for other projects, especially since it doesn't seem like we'll be building a Habitat house: I'm interested in adding the "life skills" AIDS curriculum to the sex-ed classes I've been helping with, so I'll be working on that over the summer. Callie and I will also try to get a school lunch program started at the middle school before she leaves in August. We'll meet with the head of the school district when I get back from traveling with my family - they arrive in 2 days!!
I also discovered something interesting before I left for IST: women in my town don't use birth control. There are some women with 10 kids, but most of the women coming in for prenatal consultations have few children with at least 2 years between them, leading me to assume that they use some form of contraception. On my last day at the hospital before coming to IST, though, I asked all of the women if they used contraception; only one woman out of 40 ever had. I don't know what they're doing to avoid pregnancies, besides simply not having sex, but I intend to do most of my presentations this summer about their options for birth control. (For anyone interested, at my site these include condoms, the pill, the mini-pill (for breast-feeding women), Depo, Norplant, and even tubal ligation and vasectomy, in addition to the calendar, mucus, and MAMA (breast-feeding) methods, which are less effective but free. Tubal ligation, vasectomy, and Norplant are provided at my site by the NGO Marie Stopes and are rare in Madagascar.)
I'm in Tana all weekend and then will be traveling all over the center and north of the country with my family. We'll be in touristy spots the whole time, so I should have email access pretty continually for the next month - send me a message! I'll try to post trip updates regularly too.
love, Jess
