Site Announcement, Shopping and Last Full Day in Monrovia

So today we had our big administrative session where we got all the business side info. I opened a bank account, got my first month’s pay plus settling in money (we get paid more here than we did in Guinea, but things are also more expensive), found out where my site is and who my sitemates are, got a phone number and did the Monrovia specific side of my shopping.

It turns out I’ll be teaching chemistry (and maybe more from the sound of it) at Johnny Voker High School in Saclopea (Sack-leh-pee-ah), Liberia (the school is named after a Peace Corps Volunteer from before the war….talk about big shoes to fill). I will live with Jesse, a math teacher who I know from Guinea and Roslyn (a Peace Corps Response Volutneer formerly of Peace Corps Costa Rica)who will organize PTAs for the village schools, work with the local outpost of the World Food Program and will live in the same village but not the same house as Jesse and me. It sounds like it will be a really great deal, from the sound of it Saclopea is a decent sized town and it will be great to live with Jesse and have Roz over fairly often. Talking to a couple of volunteers I met today who have been in Liberia for a few months, it seems like I can expect my students to be very behind in their basic math skills (like in Guinea, but maybe worse) and I can expect my average class size to hover around 100 students. The upside is that this time I’ll be working with Jesse (hopefully with the same students), and so we can try to coordinate his math lessons and my chem lessons around each other to help each other out.

As for the house, we don’t yet know what the actual building will be (though one of the staff members implied that it’s large and we have our own walled-in compound), but we expect to have a pretty nice set up. We split the cost of the pricier ammenities and so we were able to afford a small generator to charge our electronics, a USB internet key that runs slightly-faster-than-dial-up connections wirelessly through cell phone towers, and a gas stove). It looks like I will have regular internet access (so long as the antennas don’t short out for the town) and will be able to work with Rosetta Stone German in my free time as well. Jon and Kim (also from Guinea) will be just down the road from us (maybe an hour’s drive tops), while Levi and Luke will be another hour down the same road. Aaron and Nick, two Peace Corps response volunteers will be an hour north us.

Now that I’ve spent a bit more time in Liberia I’m really starting to like it. It’s weird to bargain in the markets in English, but I also am starting to feel more comfortable with it and am enjoying it (I spent about 30 minutes chatting a Nigerian vendor named Mike down from $5 to $2 for a cell phone charger, but we were laughing about it the whole time (apparently until now, he’s believed that Americans will just pay any price he names no matter how absurd – I told him now that Peace Corps was coming to Liberia that would surely be changing)). I also am very fond of the Liberian Peace Corps staff – it’s a very small program and so there is only like 1/4 the number of employees that there were in Guinea, but they’re all very interesting to chat with and have great senses of humor.

So now that our Monrovia shopping is done and we have had a lot of our more administrative/medical/welcome to Liberia type sessions, the plan is to go up to Gbarnga tomorrow afternoon to meet our counterparts (in my case, probably a teacher from my school who I will work closely with) and have meetings/sessions with them for a few days to hash out what exactly we expect from them and what they expect from us (at which point I expect to get a sense of how many classes/subjects I’ll be teaching). Then on Saturday we will go with our counterparts to our village to move into our new homes and start our village lives. School is supposed to start on Monday, so I’m not sure if I’ll be teaching immediately or not, but I sort of hope I am, I’m ready to start working and already the 6-8 month time limit seems to be closing in on me.