Office Work?

Close your eyes, (except – continue reading)

Picture your life if you were a Peace Corps volunteer. Where would you live, probably some place warm, probably rather barren, a small town or village? What would you do? Work outside, work with an indigenous population, live and work with the people and the land.

The last ten days I have been in and around the tourist town of Antigua, Guatemala and working in the Peace Corps office. All necessary work, I’m happy to do it, I have been training the trainees and working with GAD (the Gender and Development Committee) but I am very ready to go home.

Today I had a presentation for the trainees about the GAD committee. What is it? What do we do? How can we help them? How can they incorporate gender in their projects and communities? What’s our role on the GAD committee and what do we do and if they’re interested, how can they get involved.

Gracias a dios, that was my last presentation I have to do at the office and I am returning to site tomorrow (phew!), with four (yes, four) trainees in tow. These four trainees (three are in my program, one in Ferney’s) will be living in our site and working with us until Saturday, luckily, as I’ve been gone for so long, we will have LOTS to do!

Field based training and training of trainees

PHEW......... Sorry I haven't written in a while, I've have been very busy in the past week with the current trainees.

To refresh, if you remember or were following this blog one year ago, I was living in a community called San Miguel Duenas, and was in "training", learning Spanish and training in preventative health. Therefore, at this moment, a new group of trainees for our project (previously named Rural Home Preventative Health) Healthy Homes arrived at the end of April, and is in the office for three months training to do our jobs in different locations around Guatemala.

One of the main parts of training is Field Based Training (FBT), where the trainees spend a week travelling to the sites of serving volunteers and work in their Centro de Saluds and work with their groups giving charlas etc. I was a host of FBT and therefore had 7 trainees, my boss Basilio, a Spanish teacher and a Peace Corps driver hanging out in my site for a week. First of all, the trainees were amazing. Their Spanish was top notch, they were energetic, wanted to learn and be there and made my job MUCH easier. That being said, it was a lot of work and pressure knowing my boss was around for the entire week watching how I interacted with the trainees and seeing my work.

We did charlas on natural disasters, nutrition, family planning, germs/bacteria and a 3 hour long workshop on HIV/AIDS to a high school in one of my communities. It was a busy week, and afterwards I just wanted to sleep for a couple days...Unfortunately, I did not have that opportunity, as the day after FBT Ferney and I were hosting a BBQ in San Vicente to celebrate Ferney's time there as a volunteer and to say goodbye (he is leaving in July!). It was a great party, with some good friends and good food.

The next morning I then got up around 6, drove down towards the coast, picked up a fridge, a stove and a toaster oven from Katy and Joe, two friends who are also leaving, and drove them back to my site with my friend Ana's home stay dad. We then piled back in the car (all the people still in my site from the fiesta) and her home stay dad drove us to cuatro caminos, where we hopped on a bus and went to Antigua.

This week, and part of next week, I am in Antigua. This week I am working with a small group of trainees to help them learn how to give the HIV/AIDS workshop, which we will be giving it on Friday to a high school. And next week I am giving a presentation to the trainees for the GAD (Gender and Development) committee, before taking 2 volunteers back to San Vicente to live and work with me for three days.

I KNOW RIGHT, I'm tired just thinking about it! But I'm also excited to be working with this great group of trainees, and know that my 2nd year here will be wonderful, as I'll have them to work with.

Volcanos, tormentas and sinkholes... oh my!

Obviously, this week has been a tough one for Guatemala. I'll start this entry by saying that I made it home safe and sound, and that (thanks goodness) San Vicente suffered little damage.

The weekend started off for me on Friday morning as I was meeting my friend Ben who was flying down from NY, in Panajachel that afternoon. In Xela on my way to Pana, I get a phone call from Ferney saying that the volcano Pacaya has exploded and that Guatemala city is covered in ash and the airport is closed. The lake however was not effected, so I continue on my way.

I met up with Ana and Dana (Ana is another Peace Corps volunteer and Dana works for an NGO called Mana International) in Pana. As the afternoon wears on, so does the rain, it simply continues, but there wasn't much wind so we didn't think much of it.

Around 4 PM, after we met up with Ben and his friend Leif and we are on a launcha (boat) over to the hotel we're staying at on the other side of the lake, we find out that Peace Corps has been put on "standfast" for security purposes due to the impending tropical storm. Standfast basically means that we can't go anywhere, where ever we are when standfast is called, we have to stay there until we are told otherwise.

We spend a fun but rather uneventful night at Casa del Mundo on the lake, and head back to Pana in the AM, as there are more supplies there in case the standfast lasts for a long time. It is also the location of a consolidation point (the next step after standfast).

The boat ride from Casa del Mundo to Pana is quite short, it's only about 1/2 an hour, however, that was long enough! The boat was full as there were fewer running that morning, and it was POURING with rain. I was sitting outside of the plastic "windscreen" and got drenched! Most of my clothes are still wet. It was gross.

Anyway, we safely make it back to Pana, and put Ben and Leif on a private microbus to Antigua so they can be there if the airport re-opened (nope, but they made it up to Flores so that's good!). The storm was the first tropical storm of the season, and is called Agatha. In Central America, 83 deaths have been reported so far.

Ana, Dana and I spent the rest of the standfast holding tight at a hostel in Pana, waiting for the roads to clear. They cleared up this morning (Tuesday) and we all made it safely back to site (phew!).