In the Depths of Pre-Service Training

Namaste saathiharu! Coming to you live from week 5 of pre-service training! Things have been hectic the past few weeks and all the trainees have been busy with language and technical trainings, host family interaction, and socializing with other trainees with the scant time that remains. I have been meaning to post about my host family and Nepali culture, but haven't had the time to write that up, so it will be coming soon - very excited for that. In the meantime, here's what I've been up to.

Our trainee schedule is classes Sunday through Friday with Saturdays off. The day-to-day looks something like this:

5:30am: Wake up
6:30am: Snacks and morning tea (egg, biscuits and hot lemon water)
7:00am: Language class
9:00am: Return home for daal bhaat with the host family
10:30am: Morning and afternoon sessions (generally technical training)
4:30pm: Free/study time
8:30pm: Daal bhaat

 

A typical morning in Nepali language class.

 

As food security volunteers, we have a variety of technical trainings to undergo. Most of these are traditional sit-and-listen-with-interspersed-group-think-activities classes. Others are more hands-on  - those are great. We were granted a demo garden and a couple of bee hives to look after as part of our food security training program. Here’s a taste of some of the trainings we’ve done in and out of the classroom:

• Cultural stereotypes – Nepali and American
• Peace Corps project frameworking/reporting regimes
• Breastfeeding and nutritional needs of women and children
• All-day mushroom cultivation workshop
• Bee biology, management, and handling
• Planting ginger and turmeric in the demo garden

Chandan Ji demonstrating the careful handling of Asian honeybees and their brood chamber frames.

Beekeeping 101 roundtable: hive structure and tools of the trade.

Putting the finishing touches on our locally-made nursery bed sown with fruit tree seeds: mango, orange, citrus, dates, pears, and others.

Interspersed in our training schedule are “hub days” where all of us volunteers (education and agriculture) gather in the local town for group training sessions. Here we do more broad-scale classes that cover medical, safety and logistical information, for example. Our hub day location is generally also where we go to shop for small items, groceries, and spend time together as a volunteer group. It’s about a 2 mile walk to the hub site for the food security volunteers. Along the way are beautiful views of the rice fields and jungled hills.

Pre-service training is allegedly one of the most stressful times of being a volunteer with all the new changes, adjustments, and work to do. Generally, I’m feeling good. My Nepali is coming along well and the training staff are all very personable and enthusiastic. Sitting in classes all day every day does take a toll on me though and sometimes there’s not much I can do to ward off the sleepies – or impatience.

 
Mushroom sowing workshop day. In the background, straw cutting station (left); washing, soaking and draining stations (right); cooling station (obscured by shadecloth). In the foreground, bags of straw are being steamed in an oil drum.

Steamed straw is spread out and cooled before being shoved into bags and compressed between layers of spawn.

A proud parent. This bag will yield 5kg of oyster mushrooms if all goes well!

Then there are some extra fun days! On June 30th (or the 15th of Asadh, going by the Nepali lunar calendar; also, my birthday!) we were given the afternoon off to participate in Paddy Day. This day is a celebration of rice, as it marks the end of the planting season. Some community members were nice enough to reserve one of their fields for us - we spent a few hours planting rice in their paddy. For the average Nepali in more rural areas, Paddy Day brings people together in the ket (lowland fields) to sing, dance, and celebrate. Evidently, people also try to ambush their friends and family in the paddies and get them as muddy as possible. For us this person was Sharmila didi, who made it her goal to splash, drag and pull us all through the mud. I think she slept pretty soundly that night, but you can make your own judgments.

Working hard!

Returning from the ket.

The traditional Rice Paddy Day snack: beaten rice (chiyuraa) and yogurt (doi), with banana, chick pea (chana) and achar sides.

Post-planting festivities arranged by PC staff - lots of delicious food, laughs, and unscrupulous photos.

The days and weeks continue to be packed. Yesterday, for my day off, I accompanied my host parents to their rice fields where I spent a short time weeding with my mother and her friends - then walked home to dig a meter-deep hole for the citrus tree that was gifted to my family by PC staff. It was a long afternoon, but not nearly as long as the average Nepali fieldworker's day. My mother and her friends weeded the fields for 8 hours in the heat - truly backbreaking. Still, there's lots to do and I try to squeeze in time to study and relax when I can.