On July 17th, I will be leaving to spend two years in the Peace Corps in Mali. In this post, I'm going to answer a few general questions about how it all works. The Peace Corps is a 27-month commitment. That includes three (ish) months of pre-service training, which takes place in-country, then two years of service.
What is the Peace Corps?
Here's the official party line from the Peace Corps website:
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy established the Peace Corps to promote world peace and friendship.
The Peace Corps' mission has three simple goals:
1. Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.
2. Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.
3. Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.
Peace Corps has several general categories for the volunteers based on what type of work they'll be doing, including education, health, business, and agriculture. I am a health volunteer. My official assignment is "Health Education Specialist."
All volunteers in Africa do some work related to HIV/AIDS no matter what their primary job is. As a Health Education Specialist in Mali, I will most likely be living in a rural village with no electricity or running water. Much of the focus of the health program in Mali has to do with reducing child mortality. I may be doing stuff related to pre- and post-natal consultations, nutrition, promoting HIV/STI awareness, promoting breast feeding, family planning stuff, vaccine campaigns, malaria prevention. And that's not even the whole list. This doesn't mean that I'll be doing ALL this stuff; I'll know more when I get assigned my post.
Here's how the first couple months work. On July 17th, I meet up with my staging group in Philadelphia. This will be all the trainees going to Mali, both for Health, Agroforestry, and Small Enterprise Development. We spend two days in Philadelphia getting vaccinated and filling out paperwork, then we fly out on the 19th. After a looong layover in Paris, we arrive in Bamako late in the evening on the 20th. They take us to the Peace Corps training site, called Tubani So, where we stay for an undisclosed length of time.
Next we get broken up into smaller groups and go to villages near Tubani So, where we will live with families for basically the duration of our training period. I believe our villages are selected based on what indigenous language we will need at our future sites. This part I'm slightly unclear about because they don't know for sure what our sites will be.
Anyway, Pre-Service Training focuses intensively on language learning, but there is also "technical" training as well (i.e. how to do the job I'm supposed to be doing). Four or five weeks into training, they will tell us where our posts are going to be (they will have conducted some interviews with us to try to figure out a good match). The post is where I will spend the two years of my service. After we find out, we go stay with the volunteer that is currently at our post, or regional volunteers if we will be the first volunteer in that village, then come back to finish training. My training is supposed to end Sept. 21.
Here's some fast facts about Mali, from the CIA World Factbook and the Peace Corps' Welcome Book.
Population: about 12 million
HIV prevalence: about 2% (compared to about .4% in the U.S., about .8% in Senegal)
Official Language: French
Bambara is the most common indigenous language, and is spoken by about 80% of the population.
It is a landlocked country a little less than twice the size of Texas, with three climate zones: desert, sahel, and savannah. It's one of the poorest countries in the world, and third from the bottom of the UN's Human Development Index ranking.
