Las Yayas & Swear-In

I'm back at the PC office after my site visit! Las Yayas is absolutely beautiful. Theres a lot of agriculture in my area- they grow platanos, beans, and onions. I can see a mountain range (the Cordilleras perhaps?) in the distance, and you need to take a motorcycle ride to get into my community because it's pretty rural. The people are really amazing- everytime I visited a house I came back with an armfull of fruit! The accent is VERY different though, I'm having a really hard time understanding anyone or having anyone understand anything I'm saying. I feel like they're not even speaking Spanish sometimes. But hopefully I'll be able to figure out the accent pretty soon...or else. One funny thing that happened during my visit is that I casually mentioned to my neighbor that I had never tried guinea (guinea hen) before. The next day, guess what was slaughtered for lunch... and it was delicious.

My community is very organized with health promoters, an aquaduct, latrines, and very active community groups. I'm going to be working with the community groups to strengthen their capacity, and during the first 3 months I'll be conducting a community diagnostic to assess the needs and strengths of the community. I'm really close (20 minutes moto ride) from San Juan, which is a pretty nice city. So if I need anything, like internet, printing, etc I can just head into San Juan instead of going all the way back to the capital. Looks like a pretty good site!

Swear-in is tomorrow. I can't believe how fast training went by! Finally moving from being a trainee to a real volunteer!

Got my site!

I know I haven't gotten the chance to write in a while- I've been so busy at CBT (community-based training) in Las Tablas. So I got my site on Thursday- it's called Las Yayas in the San Juan province, about 3.5 hours from the capital. It's got less than 100 houses, which I think is the perfect size. During my pre-placement interview, I told the director that I really wanted to be in the mountains and I wanted to build stuff, like latrines and aquaducts. When I asked on Thursday if I was in the mountains, I think he was trying to let me down slowly because he kept saying "it's very pretty... there are hills." So I have no idea what to expect but I am happy to know where I'm heading!

CBT has been awesome. I was put with an AMAZING family. My 12-year-old host brother and I play soccer a lot and my "aunt" does my nails on a weekly basis. I'm also getting plenty of practice using a latrine- which definitely does take practice. So this is funny: We took a field trip to the capital to see an organization called ProFamilia. While there, about 6 of us went to the US Embassy and ordered burgers from the cafeteria. 2 days later, 4 of us were really sick. Out of all places in the country, the US Embassy gave us amoebas! We're all ok now, but that was my first in-country illness experience, and it wasn't too shabby.

So we only have a week left of CBT; we leave next Saturday for the capital to finish up training in the capital. CBT has absolutely flown by. We typically have Spanish all morning and technical training all afternoon, and meanwhile we each had to give 3 technical presentations to people in the community.