A week of fury and frustration

I am not having a good time. I went to teach Life Skills and for the 5th time in a row, the students were doing other activities. The school obviously doesn’t care about this program, so I’m dropping it. Don’t come crying to me about how many girls drop out from pregnancy and how they need HIV education.

They changed the time of my environment program because they had a soccer match. NOT cool, when they mess with the times I can’t get the kids to show up. The teacher blames the headmaster, who conveniently is never there for me to talk to. We have told them numerous times to STOP doing this, but they continue it. The week before, we did a dry season tree planting training, and the kids whined and became prissy all of a sudden and didn’t want to touch the manure. Excuse me? Who said fixing the environment would be clean? Also, the Mikumi trip is likely called off. The school couldn’t pull itself together for 5 minutes to write a letter to the park requesting a reservation, and now we don’t have time to get a response before the midterm break.

The Agriculture officer agreed to write a budget for my chicken project, said I could have it in 2 days. 3 weeks later, he meets me in town as I get off the bus, the absolute LAST minute to give it to me before I leave for Tanga. Then he walks me halfway across town (I’m carrying my luggage and batiks to sell to the trainees) so he can make a copy. Really? You had no time to make copies earlier? After waiting outside the shop nearly 30 minutes, I go in. He’s having it typed. I will have to type it up later into the grant form anyway. I blew up. I’ll be lucky if he does the chicken training. (Actually, I might be lucky if he doesn’t, he can’t seem to follow through on things very well.)

Peace Corps screwed up and deleted me from the training schedule without telling me. I found out when I called about something else. They said I didn’t need to show for PCV of the week because I didn’t have a session to teach, despite the fact that I was selected to teach a specific session and submitted lesson plans…twice. That was fun to sort out. The PC here is the epitome of “left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.” I did get approval to go and my session time, eventually. Also they managed to assign exactly no one to my area of the country! After promising me 3 PCVs and leaving me there all alone! Thanks, guys! My complaints were met with indifference, despite that fact that they are never, ever supposed to leave someone isolated at site like that. And it’s not just me this is happening to.

Basically, my overriding emotion the last week+ has been anger and confusion.