Friday, May 14, 2010

Training - Pt. 1


Atlanta. Guatemala City. Santa Lucia de Milpas Altas. Alotenango.

In 3.5 days.

Now that could sound stressful, but between moving around so much and the warm tortillas at every meal, I’ve managed somehow to not completely lose my mind over the fact that I’ll be living in Guatemala for the next 27 months. And most likely in a town hours away from any “city” and people who speak Spanish. Electricity and water? That’d be super, but lets not get our hopes up.

Now that I’ve sufficiently freaked you out, I’ll tell you about my host family/living situation for my 11 weeks of training: it’s awesome. That about sums it up, but to name the highlights of the Toledo casa: a bed that doesn’t smell in my OWN room with a DOOR, TWO TVs (both with cable), and a view of the volcanoes in the morning. I’m currently living in Alotenango which is about 20 minutes in the bus past Antigua, which I have to pass through on my way to the Peace Corps office in Santa Lucia de Milpas Altas (which is about 45 min. outside of Guatemala City). Alotenango means “between volcanoes.” It resides in the valley between 2 adjacent volcanoes – Fuego and Acatenango, and Volcan Agua. Fuego is the only active one, which erupts and sends tremors out pretty often.

I’ve been placed in the most advanced language group with other Healthy Homes volunteers, so we’ll be doing a lot of Field Based Training over the next 11 weeks - preparing practice presentations like the ones we’ll give in our communities, going on cultural excursions, practicing riding the camionetas (chicken buses), and occasional Spanish classes (which is really just sitting down with our professor and talking about random stuff). We’ll spend a week with a current Healthy Homes volunteer near the end of May/early June, and then a 4 day visit to our future site once we receive our assignments in the 2nd half of June.

Other than that, life is pretty uneventful. Training has been pretty boring so far, but we should get more time in the Health Center because we need less language instruction, so hopefully things will pick up. The Toledo family’s favorite volunteer of all time left a few weeks ago, and evidently, she was a great cook. If anyone has any ideas of simple (American) things I could make for a family that don’t include ingredients that I can only find in the states/would we super expensive here, I’d really appreciate it. Hope everyone is well and I miss you all more than you know.