The Land of Lost Things

I am more than halfway through my homestay portion of training, and that’s a little terrifying because I feel like I still have so much to learn, about my service and about Spanish, heaven help me. However, it’s also kind of exciting because I’m getting excited about finding out my site, and getting started with meeting the people in my new community.

If one of the purposes of training is to increase confidence, sometimes I feel like I’m moving forward, and sometimes I’m going backwards. To demonstrate this, I have two examples. Last Thursday we had our youth group meeting in which we needed to select a project and set up a tentative timeline. We succeeded, but it was one of the most frustrating experiences I’ve had here so far. We were all tired from our volunteer visits, and the kids all had great ideas and wanted to express them (simultaneously), and it felt like the situation was just totally out of hand. It’s especially frustrating because in English it would have been easy to manage, but in Spanish it was difficult and demoralizing. (I feel like I write a lot of really positive stuff, and for the sake of honesty I need to talk about the hard times too.) The counter-example is that as part of training we have to design and give a survey with our training group about something environmental. We created a survey about what people do with their trash here in Masatepe. It doesn’t seem like a complicated topic, but it’s a problem here, and it’s important to gather as much information as possible. Today I gave the survey to two people, one of whom I had met before but didn’t really know well, and one to whom I had never said more than “Adios.” It was exhilarating to do it successfully. To be able to talk to a stranger – to ask them questions and actually understand their answers, and to answer their questions about me and about Peace Corps and what I’m doing here. Today I felt like I’m actually getting a little closer to being able to accomplish some of the goals of Peace Corps.

A brief aside about the goals of Peace Corps. If you don’t care, just skip this paragraph. Peace Corps has three goals, and they are (as quoted from my Volunteer handbook):

1. To help the people of interested countries in meeting their needs for trained men and women.

2. To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.

3. To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of all Americans.

I hope that this blog is helping with goal number 3, and my ability to communicate greatly increases the possibility of working toward all three.

Now, I promised an update on the available sites once I found out where they are, and as of Friday we have a list, as well as brief descriptions of the sites. We still won’t find out where we’re going for another few weeks, but that’s okay. I won’t bore you with all the gory details, but here’s some info.

• There are 4 sites in León (one of which is for a married couple), 3 in Chinandega (one of which is for a married couple), 4 in Matagalpa, 2 in Boaco, 1 in Chontales, and 1 on the island of Ometepe.
• There are 4 very small sites available, which are attractive to me.
• In order to think about which sites I might like, I created a list of criteria and then awarded points accordingly. While I’m not going to cry if I don’t get the sites I want (at least I hope), it helped me figure out which ones looked good to me, since there is so much information in each description to consider.

Things that I included on my site selection matrix (yes, I’m a dork):

• Is it a small site? I feel like a smaller site will allow me to integrate better into the whole community, but I think it will be a lot like my experience at USC. You find a smaller community within the larger one.
• Will I have a site mate? I don’t think I want one because one of my goals is to speak terrific Spanish by the time I leave. The ability to use English freely with a fellow gringo might impede that.
• Are there projects there that are interesting to me? This includes any particular environmental issues (such as mangroves), library projects, or the opportunity to work with ecotourism.
• Is the site in the mountains or on an island? Call me shallow, I don’t care.
• Will I be a first generation environmental volunteer? There’s something very attractive about forging new relationships with teachers, instead of walking in as someone’s replacement. However, as usual I am stressed about money, and being able to buy a lot of my stuff from another volunteer holds a certain attraction as well.
• Are their recreational opportunities that interest me? León and Chinandega do have the beach, but I think I would prefer to live somewhere where there is ample opportunity for hiking, and a distinct possibility of riding some horses.

All that being said, ultimately my PC bosses will put me wherever they think I fit best, and the word from last year’s volunteers is that many of them didn’t understand their site placement at first, but now they are all very happy with where they live. Therefore, I choose to put my faith in the process, and I’ll get back to you when I know where I’m headed!