The Site Visit

Three small words, but it is an incredibly weird and important moment in your Peace Corps experience. After all, this is your first time being in the place that someone else has picked out for you to be for the next two years of your life. It was a roller coaster of emotions, probably a bit like a microcosm of our next two years.

The first thing we did was head out early on Sunday to get up to La Palma (the biggest “city” near our site) by noon. There was an organic product fair in the central park and we were meeting up with the volunteer who helped put it together. It was a chance to meet a lot of the important people in our area, which we did. A quick aside that applies to the whole weekend is that names in foreign countries, in a foreign language really do make it that much hard to remember anyone’s correct name. Sure sometimes you’ll get the stray Carlos, or Pablo… but you also get lots of Edilberto Isreal, or Ever Fernando. Then the added complication of Spanish names is whether in normal conversation you’ll use the first or the second name… or maybe even a diminutive. All of which boils down to me meeting a ton of important people whose name I’ll never remember.

None the less, we met lots of people at the fair and all of them were very excited to meet us, and were very glad that we were coming to help. The next morning we headed up the road to San Ignacio which is the town whose Municipio we are in. It is also where we switch buses to the one that will take us the rest of the way to our site. It was here that we met up with my counterpart. He is the head of the communities “association”. At some point I’ll try to write about the political structure, but for now, just know that he has a type of political power within my community. He is really a great guy, seems very motivated and able to think about the future. His Spanish is clear, and I can understand him very well, which is nice… he probably can’t say the same of me.

Rather than giving a blow by blow, which would be tedious (the days were packed), I’ll try to give an overview that focuses on feelings. I realize now why we have had to integrate into so many different families and communities during our time here. If we had not had that practice, the whole of site visit would have been that much more intimidating. The whole community is fantastic, and scary. The people are amazing, and they were all more nervous meeting us, then us meeting them. They have never had a volunteer at this site before, so it was all very new. The idea of “pena” is a big deal here… it can translate into embarrassment, or timidity, but it is bigger and more cultural than any of that. We had to overcome a lot of “pena” during this time. Luckily Katie’s counterpart is the Director of the school. So, on the second full day that we were there, we got to participate in a graduation ceremony. I must say that we gave fine speeches! Ours were short at least, but they all listened, and even applauded. This helped with the “pena”, after our speech, people were more wiling to start short conversations with us.

Although the vast majority of our moments were how great the whole thing is, we were not without our moments of “oh my god, this is a crazy thing to try to do and the people are expecting so much of us, and we can’t even really talk to them! “ Within moments of each other we’d feel like, “wow this is why we wanted to do this,” followed almost immediately by “what are we doing here?”

This is cut a bit short cause I have things to do.... I'll get more out later, and hopefully I'll figure out how to get the photos to load up as well. Cheers!