Friday, March 13, 2009

Training Update

The past couple of days of training have been great because the sessions are starting to focus on Peace Corps’ development strategies and what is expected of us as volunteers. I have a much better grasp of what my life will be like for the next two years and how to integrate myself into my host community. Now that I have a more realistic view of my role as a volunteer, I feel a million times more confident about starting service. I realized that I am a lot more prepared to do community development work than I thought because of my background in anthropology, the work I’ve done with Students Helping Honduras, and even just my personality.

What I consider the most important and effective aspect of our service is that we are not coming to our communities with an agenda nor is it our job to find things to change or improve. And we aren’t expected to be experts on any one thing. Instead, we have certain tools we can use to get the community to express its own wants and needs. After they have identified things they want to do, we are sort of like their personal cheerleaders who egg them on and support and encourage them as much as possible as they work towards achieving their goals. So we don’t have our own personal projects that we’re working on. Instead, we’re helping to get people more involved in their communities and trying to help them realize their full potential as empowered agents of change.

We’ve also been discussing how Americans have a “doing” mindset, i.e.: what do you do for a living or what did you do today? But for the first few months in our community, our goal isn’t to “do” anything. We are outsiders and our job is to get to know people in our community and make personal connections, not jump in and start changing things. On one hand, I know that at first I will have to battle with my own desire to feel productive or reach certain benchmarks, but on the other hand, it’s very exciting to have the time to truly get to know my community and to be a part of something much bigger than myself.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Goooooood Morning!!!!

So I have landed safe and sound in Costa Rica and I have to say, so far it’s as beautiful as everyone has said. On the 45 minute drive from the San Jose airport to our mountain retreat center on the east side of the city, we saw brilliantly colored houses, palm trees, coffee plantations, lots of US fast food chains, and of course the mountains. The retreat center is a bright yellow compound filled with palm trees, birds of paradise and other flowers, neon green parakeets that seem to never stop squawking- but since they’re parakeets I guess it’s pretty cool- and perhaps most wonderful of all, free WiFi!!! We’re all feeling pretty spoiled because of that, since our internet access will probably be scarce after our four days of orientation here end and we head out to our training sites and host families.

All the volunteers are nice and full of energy, but I have to say so far my favorite person is Carmen, the only volunteer in our group who is a bit older. She’s a 60 year old retired massage therapist who has run 57 triathlons and has the best sense of humor. She joined Peace Corps because she was Sgt. Shriver’s massage therapist and he yelled at her to get her citizenship (she’s from Lima, Peru) and join up! At our staging event in Georgetown, she was my roommate, and when we had to wake up at 12:30 am (that’s right…we got about 2 hours of sleep) she made me coffee and managed to get a bell boy to take our luggage down to the lobby in a matter of seconds when she’d been told earlier it would take at least 45 minutes because they were so busy.

The past two days have mostly been “welcome to Peace Corps” and “what are you excited or nervous about” type exercises. We also felt earthquake tremors- but don’t worry because apparently the epicenter was somewhere in the South Pacific Ocean. Also, it was so light that I didn’t even know what it was. I felt my bunk bed shake a bit and one of my roommates from California asked, “Was that an earthquake?” and I was like, “No waaaaay!” Shows what I know… Earthquakes are a problem in Costa Rica, and we’ll probably be getting a lot of training about what to do in a more severe one. A few months ago the country was hit by a pretty bad one, although the infrastructure here is built to withstand the impact and people have said that if it had happened in neighboring Nicaragua, it would have been much worse. Today, after finally getting a good night’s rest, I was up with the sun at 6. This is our first serious day of training. We have our language assessment, the introduction to our assignments (mine is Rural Community development), and our medical session- where I think we’ll be getting all our shots and our malaria pills- joy!!

That’s all for now, but keep those e-mails coming since I’ll be able to write you regularly until Sunday. Lots of love to all!!!