Peace Corps Jargon
APCD: Associate Peace Corps Director. In Malawi we have one for each sector. We have 3 sectors in Malawi: Health, Education, and Environment. My APCD is a Malawian (the Environment APCD, Brian, is the only American APCD here).
CD: Country Director—the guy in charge. We’re getting a new one and have an Acting CD right now. The CD is always American.
Counterpart: The Malawian you work with the most. You can have different counterparts for different projects.
ET: Early Terminate. When a volunteer decides to go home for their own, personal, reasons.
IGA: Income Generating Activity. A project we assist with to help raise money for community groups or other projects.
IST, or Inservice training: the training we do after having been at site for 3 months (unless you’re me, and then you do it after a month and a half.) One of the weeks, our counterparts come.
LPI: Language Proficiency Interview. We take a mock-LPI a little over a month into training, one at the end of training, and one at end of service. It’s a taped conversation you have with someone who is authorized to teach Chichewa. It is listened to by one other language instructor and they agree on your proficiency level. I believe the lowest passing level is Low-Intermediate now.
MST, or mid-service training: Three days follow-up training after about a year in country.
PCMO, or Peace Corps Medical Officer: These are our docs. Malawi is unusual in that we have 2 PCMOs and a nurse. Which is good, because it seems like we’re supposed to notify them for half of everything. They’re easily bribed by cookies, though.
PCV: Peace Corps Volunteer
Smut magazines: Not technically an official Peace Corps term, it refers to things like People or In Touch.
No comments yet.