Final Week of Training

It´s pretty unreal that I´ve been here for almost 3 months and my training is coming to a close. I had my final lanugage interview today, my final common session yesterday, and tomorrow night I´m cooking a big dinner for my family to say thank you and goodbye. It´s all so final.

I´m ready to move to my site, but it´s bittersweet to be sure. I´ve come to love my training site and my family. But I suppose it´s the things you love that are the hardest to leave, so it´s not a bad feeling.

Friday morning we head to the Ambassador´s house and have our swearing-in ceremony and then we´ll have a big party as a group to celebrate our completion of training, and then Sunday...we´re off. To start our lives in our new homes.

Site Assignment and Visit

After 2 months plus a few days of training, the day of October 8th came and it was time to find out our site assignments. I was a little crazy the few days before. Cali, Dan, and I came up with a list of possible places and literally spent hours guessing where we and the rest of our group would be going. On the morning of the 8th I woke up at 5:30 and was so excited I couldn´t go back to sleep. In typical Roberto fashion (he´s my boss- the director of the Municipal Development program), he arrived 25 minutes late, making us all slightly more crazy than we already were. He dramatically rolled out a map and handed us fancy folders with the names of our locations on them and then proceeded to place his finger on the map to demonstrate our locations. Turns out I was right- I guessed correcty!



Interruption: sadly, I can´t actually tell you where I´m going because of Peace Corps security rules for blogs. so if you wanna know, you´re gonna have to email me. I know, you probably hate me right now....but really, even if I told you, you´d have no idea where it was anyway! Plus it´s a good excuse for you to email me and tell me about what´s happening in your life. Then I´ll email you back and give you the official name of my location- plus, that´s way more interactive and fun!



What I can tell you is that it´s in the department (state) of Huehuetenango, which is the most northwestern state and it borders Mexico. The town is adorable and tiny. The population is 100% indigenous Mayan and I´ll be learning a language called Mam. It´s pronounced Mom which means I get to make awesome jokes like ¨hey, how´s your Mam?¨ I´ll be working in the Municipal Women´s office promoting human rights and working to strengthen the capacity of the office. It sounds like a pretty cool gig.



Just about a week after we got our site assignments and had enough time to build up sufficient curiosity about these places, they brought in our counterparts (the people who we´ll be working with in our communities) for a day and a half of training and then sent us off to our sites with them for the rest of the week. I got to see the office I´ll be working in, meet some community members, and I found an adorable house to live in! I have to admit though, it´s going to be pretty strange to be living there in 2 weeks. wow...2 weeks!

Feria de San Dionisio

The town Marimba band

Hayde and Esperanza (my host mom)

Waiting for the Gigantes

Video of the Gigantes (sorry, my camera doesn't do sound!)

So every town in Guatemala has a patron saint and every patron saint has a holiday. The patron saint of Pastores is San Dionisio and we've been celebrating all week in his honor. The festival, or feria, features lots of music, parades, fireworks, cultural demonstrations, and even a beauty pageant.

Individual Directed Activities

With Kay in Ixchiguan

On Miriam's balcony in Xela

Tallest point in Central America! Tajumulco

One part of our training to be volunteers is visiting another volunteer to see their work and lifestyle. So last week we were sent off (first time trying to navigate the crazy bus system alone!) with the name and location of a volunteer to visit. I went to visit Kay in San Marcos. San Marcos is a department (state) north west of where I am currently, it touches both the pacific coast and the Mexican border. Kay lives waaaaay up in the mountains where you have to sleep with wool socks and winter hats on in order to keep warm.

It was absolutely beautiful there. The drastic mountains gave way to rolling hills as we climbed higher and higher on our way there, and the giant trees shrunk to shrubs because the oxygen is so thin at 12,000 feet. We could see two volcanoes from her window; one, Tajumulco, is the tallest point in Central America and looked like a pretty small hill from our vantage point not far below it.

Not only did I get to experience another totally different part of Guatemala, I also got to see the work Kay is doing in her office. She works in the OMP- Oficina Municipal de Planificacion (Municipal Planning Office) and is currently working on a community diagnostic. There’s about 80 small communities in her municipality and with the help of her counterpart, Annabe, is visiting each one of them to fill out a census type form that will help the municipal office determine where the greatest needs of their communities are. They ask questions on everything from how many people live in the community and what type of water services they have, to whether or not the community has a library and if there are children with special needs. It was pretty neat to see the people gathered to answer these questions and willing to work to achieve real development in their communities. Kay thinks the whole process of collecting this information will probably take the rest of her service, but once finished, it can be passed along to the next volunteer and used by the Muni to complete projects for the communities that need them most.

Lastly, I also got to see how volunteers lived. On the trip I visited 4 very different volunteer houses that ranged from a huge house in a cabbage field to a small apartment in a big town; I also collected advice on things like how to make an oven, how to get to know neighbors, and how make shelves out of cinder blocks. Three weeks and counting until I’m on my own…