Pre Service Training: The Path to Becoming a Volunteer

Here I sit, on the other side of nine weeks of acclimating to Cambodia, fondly referred to as “Pre Service Training.” PST is a required element of all Peace Corps posts, and is generally just like watching tennis: you either love it and could do it anytime, anywhere OR you freaking hate it and one more second spent watching tennis (er…in PST) is one more moment where you just want to tear your eyeballs out with your bare hands.

Luckily, Chris and I both fell in the former camp, and thoroughly enjoyed PST. 

(Now, watching tennis, that’s a whole other topic. Don’t get me started.)

Throughout the nine week process of adjusting to the weather, studying the language every day, learning the realities of Cambodian classrooms, and getting used to be in a completely different cultural situation, I constantly had to remind myself that the real work begins when we become official volunteers. During PST, you have a schedule created for you- you have somewhere to be, something to do.  You have people responsible for ensuring that you at least try to learn to speak Khmer for three or more hours a day.  You have a built in support system in the form of 20+ other Americans in your training site, and you can meet any one of those Americans at any moment of the day inside the glorified gas station that has become your sanctuary (SANCTUARY!) due to air conditioning and the promise of ice cream bars and cold Coca Cola.  If you’re bored on a Sunday, you can bet that a fellow trainee will be up for some volleyball, or a bike ride, or has a Cambodia host sister that will paint your nails for you.  At the end of training, there is a language exam meant to give you a baseline of your skills and encourage you to study and practice more to fully integrate in our new country.

I loved and relished in every one of these realities during PST.

On the flip side, I know that some of my fellow trainees felt stifled by the scheduling of our time, by the requirement that we learn the language, actually try to use it on a daily basis (?) and pass a language exam to show our competence, and completely freaked out by the general atmosphere of training.  Many a times did I hear other trainees speak longingly of “when we’re volunteers.”

And I can’t help but ask, doesn’t the hard part begin NOW, now that we’re volunteers? Now that we don’t have a host country national willing at any moment to help us arrange a ride in a tuk-tuk for a fair price, to help us remember how to say “I don’t like dried fish stuffed with pig intestine, thank you,” or to simply help us figure out what our host grandmother meant when she said “hey-oh-way?” (For the record, it’s one way of asking if you’re hungry or not.)

Granted, I’ll admit that the freshman-dorm-like atmosphere that PST took on at times was frustrating, and I did have to remind myself that for many of my fellow trainees, this was their first step after college, and didn’t I have many of the same fears and remarks and attitudes in my first six months in TFA, teaching middle schoolers?

Of course I did.

And whether you’re 21, or 26, or 46, PST is a gauntlet you just have to survive- whether you flourish, perish, or complain the entire time is entirely up to your maturity, frame of mind, and desire to succeed.  I’m happy to say that Chris and I survived and lived to swear in. We both passed our language exam, and can pretty successfully navigate situations that were terrifying two short months ago, like going to the pagoda, or ordering food, or just chit-chatting with the ladies in the market.

Here’s to the next two years, and “finally being a volunteer.”