Cultural day is finally over! It is such a relief. It was one of those days that are great laughs for everyone, except for us trainees. We showed off our Tongan handicrafts, did our skits, and performed Tongan dances with our villages.
The day had started off fairly crappy. I had a high fever the night before, didn't get much sleep, and was really out of it by the morning. I took some medicine and within the hour I was good to go! I made ufi and showed my host family how to make sweet and sour chicken. They had no teriyaki sauce so I had to change my earlier plans. I also had to do a lot of improvising since they had no oil, stove, oven, or baking powder. The chicken ended up coming out like Chicken McNuggets, but still tasted pretty good.
After our culture day was over, our town had interviews with the Peace Corps placement officer. I had a fairly good hint as to where I’ll be stationed and what I would be doing. The project would be IT stuff at a new radio station (with rumors of possible airtime) and setting up / maintaining a new computer center.
I already have some pretty grand plans for the computer center. Supposedly in a few weeks (Tongan time can be much longer), shipments of some hand-me-down computers will arrive. Setting this up would be easy and I have some plans to teach the Microsoft suite of programs, basic computer setup / maintenance, and maybe even some computer science, depending on how advance the class is.
The difficult and time consuming part isn’t in simply completing the project; it’s about building sustainability by showing and explaining this to a Tongan counterpart. Depending on the types and the quantity of computers we get, I’m hoping to get the community together to play some network games. Can we say LAN Party with 40 computers?! I’ve started asking friends to send copies of old school games (that are not very graphically intensive) like Quake 3 arena, Starcraft, Warcraft 1 / 2, and a few educational programs like Photoshop, a compiler for C#, MySQL server, etc.
One of the biggest personal challenges will be adjusting to the location. I knew that after training, our group would be split up. I just didn’t expect to be located on an island with, at most, one other volunteer from my group. I'm trying to be optimistic; even though I really love this training group, I know there are great people everywhere and no matter where I go, I’ll end up meeting more. I do hope that I can visit the training group once every other month or every third month.
On Monday we’ll find out for sure where we’ll spend the next 2 years of our life. Next Saturday we’ll be back to the capital and I can pick up my guitar (thanks very much to my family). In three weeks, we’ll hopefully all be sworn in and become volunteers. It’s an exciting time. As much as I love training, I can’t wait until training is over so I can set my own schedule again. Now if only we didn’t have to pay the lofty prices for Internet here, everything would just be perfect.
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