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!