Nuts & Bolts

As of today, I have been in Guatemala for one week, but it feels like it has been months given the amount of information with which we have been bombarded since stepping off the airplane. The following is a basic summation of what has occurred since I departed St. Louis a little over a week ago:

On April 30th, I departed for our Staging Event in Washington D.C. There we spent a day and a half learning about Peace Corps in a macro sense (kudos to JFK) and getting to know each other through the standard array of quasi-cheesy ice-breaker activities. My group consists of 27 volunteers working in the program areas of Small Business Development, Youth Development, and Appropriate Technologies. Along with four other volunteers I will be in the Small Business Development (SBD) program. At this point, my understanding as to what SBD volunteers actually do is still a bit murky, as they are phasing out the program (we will be the last group) and merging it with Agricultural Marketing in the future.

We departed D.C. very early (as in leaving our hotel at 4 am) on the morning of May 2nd and after a layover in Atlanta, we arrived in Guatemala City around noon. From there we headed straight for the Peace Corps’ training center in Santa Lucia Milpas Altas, a small town in the mountains on the road between Guatemala City and Antigua, for a short 3 day “retreat”. In the past PC conducted the entirety of its three-month volunteer training at Santa Lucia in a collegiate type atmosphere where volunteers attended classes on language, health, safety, and technical skills Monday through Saturday at the center. My group, however, will be just the second batch of volunteers to go through the new Community Based Training (CBT) program. Now just one day a week will be spent together at the center for joint sessions, while the rest of the time we will be undertaking language and technical training in small groups in the eight different villages in which we were placed to live. Peace Corps’ reasoning behind this change is to accelerate our apprehension of Spanish and to lessen the shock on being on our own when we are put on a bus and pointed in the direction of our permanent site in three months time.

I am sharing “my” village (the Peace Corps asks that we not publish our exact whereabouts as a safety precaution—as if some terrorist somewhere is searching through blogs looking for an easy American target stationed in the middle of nowhere) with only one other trainee. As previously stated, I will be here for three months for the duration of training. At the end of June, I will find out my site placement and on July 20th I will depart for my new home. PC has already chosen its sites but uses the training period to access our skills and taken into account our preferences before deciding which volunteer will be assigned to which site. Our rule to live by here, “Be flexible.”

And so I will end this dry, information-packed blog with some tidbits about Peace Corps Guatemala…

There are 165 volunteers in the country, not including our group (we are not official volunteers until after we finish training), serving in 9 different program areas.

Established in 1963, it is one of the oldest programs, and amazingly it never suspended operations during Guatemala’s long and violent civil war.

It is one of only a few programs that still allows volunteers to ride (not drive) on a motorcycle. Not that I will probably ever need to, but for some reason this little freedom makes me happy.