The new job: Volunteer Technical Assistant

When Peace Corps staff talk about what Pre Service Training (PST) is like for new trainees to Kazakhstan, they usually say its like "drinking from a fire hose" because of the amount and the speed of information that trainees are exposed to. It's fast and it can be overwhelming, kind of like trying to stop a fire hose on full blast by trying to drink the water.

It's not like this, exactly. Or at all. But there is a lot of stuff for trainees to learn at PST. (Speaking of learning, who knew that you could post videos on a blog?! Now that I can do this, I'll upload later some videos that I made during the youth leadership camp in Issyk)

If PST for a trainee is like trying to quench your thirst from the local fire department, then the days leading up to PST for Volunteer Technical Assistants (VTA) are like attempting to get a glass of water by sticking it under Niagara Falls. I say this because VTA's play a role in organizing PST usually by taking a large amount of information, sorting out the useful stuff and cramming it down into comprehensible sessions that a person freshly arrived from America should be able to understand.

For the VTAs to the Youth Development Program (YD), sorting through large amounts of information is especially important because this program is very new to Kazakhstan. It was a pilot program last year, and from that experience Peace Corps has learned some powerful lessons on how to work with youth in Kazakhstan and they want to incorporate these lessons into their future trainings. This means that a vast majority of what was done with the YD program last year needed to be scrapped, reworked, or plain old reinvented. This task of redeveloping training this year falls to me, another volunteer and 3 talented Kazakhstan nationals. So while I've completed my primary work assignment, I've still got a ways to go before I finish in Kazakhstan because I'll be involved with this until early November.

As of late I've been sitting in front of a computer for days designing various technical sessions. Some sessions are easy to make because I've done them before like PDM, grassroots fund raising and leadership trainings. However, some sessions are very hard because I've never heard of the concepts before. The hardest part is figuring out how some American concepts regarding youth development fit into a Kazakhstan framework.

For example, how does the 40 Assets Approach apply to Kazakhstan youth NGOs? Although I usually end each day with a headache, it's fun to research new topics and to design trainings that Peace Corps will use for up to half a decade into the future.

And that's not all. When the actual trainees arrive, the VTAs role switches to a mentor, translator, liaison, facilitator, teacher, storyteller, cheerleader, advocate, musician, cook, and anything else that is required to assist new trainees and Peace Corps staff for 11 weeks. I'm looking forward to it!

Being a VTA is fun but it is a lot of work. If anyone has a spare duplicator that they'd want to send to Kazakhstan it would be greatly appreciated.