First In Country Post
Well, being the first blog entry in country, I feel like I should have something dramatic to say. The truth is that the most useful thing is for me to go through some of the mundane details so that you have an idea of what we are currently going through.
We have been in country almost two weeks now, and it feels like much more because we have done so much. It has been a very full two weeks of training, that started just shortly after we got off the plane. We spent the first two nights in a hotel in San Vicente… more or less like many of the hotels we have stayed in while traveling Central America. For most of our group it wasn’t too much of a shock, they are a pretty worldly group even though they are young by my seasoned standards.
After the first two days we moved in with our families. We are scattered around in the smaller communities near San Vicente. There are usually four trainees per community, so Katie and I have two other trainees in our community, and there are actually another four trainee is a community within walking distance. Our family is great! We have roughly 10 ninos attached to our extended family all living in casas around a central area. So, Katie and I had lots of kids to play with upon arrival…. Which is nice, because they don’t require long conversations in our pitiful Spanish!
So a “typical” day (and really every day is quite different) runs more or less as follows:
Wake up around 5:30am… with Roosters starting about 2am, and going on and off from there it took us awhile to adjust to be able to sleep in till 5:30! Then we go and have our bucket showers, cold water of course. The smaller plastic buckets are called “guacales” here, and the washbasin is a “pila”. The pila where we take our showers is actually fairly nice and mostly private compared to many of the trainees. We have a very nice pig that lives nearby, and a Mott-mott (bird) that checks in on us as we bathe.
After bathing we eat breakfast around 6:15. It is usually a couple of hard rolls (soft inside) of bread with either frijoles or crema inside, and some hot drink, either coffee, chocolate, or milk. At 7am we walk to the bus for our ride to San Vicente. We only go to San Vicente about 3 days a week, on 3 others our Spanish teacher comes to our community and spends the day there working with the four of us till about 5pm. On the days we go to San Vicente the days are split into about 4 even parts, two before lunch and two after. These sessions cover a range of subjects from technical skills like lombriculture and composting, to medicine (all of the things we can get and how to avoid them), and basic concepts of development, or Salvadorean culture, ect…. Also we typically have Spanish during these days as well.
We finish around 5pm…. So far we have gone long every time. By the time we catch our bus back to our community, we get “home around 6pm or so, and it is already getting dark (closer to the equator remember!). About 6 to 6:30 sometime we eat dinner. All of the food has been very good, and really a pretty good variety as well. The only thing I have noticed is that the tortillas, which come with every meal expect breakfast, have become more of a chore to eat over time. They are very good, fresh and warm, but it is still a lot of corn masa to put down every day. They are very thick here, probably a quarter inch or more… very filling!
Well, that’s long enough for one entry. Next time I’ll catch you up more with our family and community time. I hope to make entries about once a week, that should work during this training period most of the time. Hasta Luego.
We have been in country almost two weeks now, and it feels like much more because we have done so much. It has been a very full two weeks of training, that started just shortly after we got off the plane. We spent the first two nights in a hotel in San Vicente… more or less like many of the hotels we have stayed in while traveling Central America. For most of our group it wasn’t too much of a shock, they are a pretty worldly group even though they are young by my seasoned standards.
After the first two days we moved in with our families. We are scattered around in the smaller communities near San Vicente. There are usually four trainees per community, so Katie and I have two other trainees in our community, and there are actually another four trainee is a community within walking distance. Our family is great! We have roughly 10 ninos attached to our extended family all living in casas around a central area. So, Katie and I had lots of kids to play with upon arrival…. Which is nice, because they don’t require long conversations in our pitiful Spanish!
So a “typical” day (and really every day is quite different) runs more or less as follows:
Wake up around 5:30am… with Roosters starting about 2am, and going on and off from there it took us awhile to adjust to be able to sleep in till 5:30! Then we go and have our bucket showers, cold water of course. The smaller plastic buckets are called “guacales” here, and the washbasin is a “pila”. The pila where we take our showers is actually fairly nice and mostly private compared to many of the trainees. We have a very nice pig that lives nearby, and a Mott-mott (bird) that checks in on us as we bathe.
After bathing we eat breakfast around 6:15. It is usually a couple of hard rolls (soft inside) of bread with either frijoles or crema inside, and some hot drink, either coffee, chocolate, or milk. At 7am we walk to the bus for our ride to San Vicente. We only go to San Vicente about 3 days a week, on 3 others our Spanish teacher comes to our community and spends the day there working with the four of us till about 5pm. On the days we go to San Vicente the days are split into about 4 even parts, two before lunch and two after. These sessions cover a range of subjects from technical skills like lombriculture and composting, to medicine (all of the things we can get and how to avoid them), and basic concepts of development, or Salvadorean culture, ect…. Also we typically have Spanish during these days as well.
We finish around 5pm…. So far we have gone long every time. By the time we catch our bus back to our community, we get “home around 6pm or so, and it is already getting dark (closer to the equator remember!). About 6 to 6:30 sometime we eat dinner. All of the food has been very good, and really a pretty good variety as well. The only thing I have noticed is that the tortillas, which come with every meal expect breakfast, have become more of a chore to eat over time. They are very good, fresh and warm, but it is still a lot of corn masa to put down every day. They are very thick here, probably a quarter inch or more… very filling!
Well, that’s long enough for one entry. Next time I’ll catch you up more with our family and community time. I hope to make entries about once a week, that should work during this training period most of the time. Hasta Luego.
posted by Jon & Katie | 11:47 AM
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