Immersion Days -part 1-

So, the concept behind immersion days is to get a feel for what it is like to be a full volunteer… the sense of being out there on your own, no one to speak English too, and having to rely on whatever Spanish you have acquired up to that point. They have a volunteer find a family for you to stay with near that volunteer’s community, and you just stay with them for a few days, after which you meet back up with the volunteer and spend a night hanging with them.

I have to say I got fairly lucky, and though I was pretty immersed, I had it easy in most ways. The volunteer I was assigned to was Laura (blog linked to the left). She lives in Apaneca, which is the first place I got lucky. It is a beautiful area, part of “La ruta de las flores”. It is coffee county, high up for the best coffee, which means it is quite a bit cooler than most of the rest of the country. The family that Laura had set me up with was extremely nice, and quite a bit different than my regular host family. They worked for the “dueño” of the land they lived on, taking very good care of some really nice and well trained horses. Don Jaime was the dueño, and he had big plans for the land around the house. They were busy building a new office near the arena, and had future plans for a hotel and restaurant.

Don Jaime seemed to be very respected, and considered very humble and nice by everyone that I spoke with. I liked him a lot, for one thing his Spanish was much clearer…I could understand almost everything that he said. He felt better if I stayed at his place, so he gave me a key to his office area. It was a very nice set up! I had a nice comfortable bed, and my own bathroom with a flush toilet and hot shower. The set up was that I would eat my meals, and spend time with the one family, and then go across the highway to go to my room to rest or sleep. So far from having a tougher assignment during immersion, it was the best “space” I have had since I have arrived in the country.

It still provided me with a lot of insight into the country. For instance, because the coffee country is so important, and the coffee fincas are owned by richer landowners who have larger plots of land. There are no “milpas” in this area at all. Milpas are the staple of much of the rest of the county. They are small farms that are planted with maize and then beans. They provide both the income, but more importantly the subsistence for a family, or several. In the land of coffee there is no room for these types of farm, all of the land is coffee. This means that though there is good work (and pay) for the 4 months of the year that you can harvest the coffee, you have nothing to live off of the rest of the year, and you have to buy all of your food. This tends to make the poor people of these areas that much poorer.

I will go into a bit more in the next installment. Also, I hope to get Katie to write about her experiences as they were quite a bit different from mine. The good thing is, we both enjoyed ourselves, and feel that much more comfortable about living here for the next two years.