Nine Weeks Later...

Wednesday, I officially became a Peace Corps Volunteer. We had the swearing-in ceremony at the Ambassador’s house. In the post below, you can see a clean-shaven, ‘fro-sporting volunteer next to the Ambassador and PC Country Director, a volunteer who is ready for whatever the next two years might bring.

But this is only the beginning.

After several years of wanting nothing else than to join the Peace Corps, six months of applying, three months of waiting, and two months of training, I am now a Peace Corps Volunteer.

My journey started on February 24. After a brief meeting in Washington with the 44 other members of my training group, we were in Quito a day later. The first few days in Quito were filled with meetings and general information about Peace Corps Ecuador. Then, we moved out to the training site in Cayambe, an hour north of Quito.

We were split up into training villages where we lived with host families. I was living with a host mother, brother, and sister in the community furthest away from Cayambe (an hour and fifteen minute bus ride). I never learned what happened to the father, but I didn’t need to know. I had a great time with my host family. They loved watching my movies, listening to me butcher their language, and enjoying my creations in the kitchen.

I really enjoyed my host family and don’t think the experience could have gone any better. I have heard that people in the Sierra (the Andean region of Ecuador) are really good at detecting people’s moods. I don’t’ know if this is true, but I do know that my host mother in La Chimba was better at reading my moods than anyone I have ever met. If something bothered me with training or if I was hungry or tired, she would know without me saying anything. It was really incredible. Sometimes I would feel something and not know what I was feeling. Then she would ask me if something was bothering me from training, and I would realize what was wrong.

Training was very comprehensive. Three days a week we had language training in our host communities and had general meetings with the entire training group twice a week. The general meeting topics were normally about security, cross-cultural issues, and technical topics.

Four weeks into training, we received our site assignments. I told the trainers that I had no real geographic preference and was ready for anything. And, in Ecuador, even though the country is relatively small, one could really be anywhere in terms of geography. One could be on the beach, in the middle of a cloud forest, living at 10,000 feet below a snow-capped peak, in the middle of the jungle, or on the Galapagos Islands.

My site is in in the El Oro province in a city of 14,000 people. Some of my friends are in communities of seven families, so this is a change of pace from what one might think of when they picture the typical Peace Corps site — in Africa with no electricity, no running water, a hole for a toilet, and a mud hut. I’m not complaining.

I will be working for the Office of Environmental Management at the local municipality. I will assist in reforestation projects, teach environmental education, work with the local landfill, help run the municipal tree nursery, and work with the local ecological reserve to protect a dry tropical rainforest. I got to visit my site for four days to get to know my host family, my office, and what I will be doing for the first four months. I was really happy with my experience and excited about the opportunity for the next two years.

When I returned to Cayambe after my site visit, I felt like my mind never left my site. Because I knew I would only be in training for a few more weeks, I felt like I was ready to leave and ready for the challenges presented by my site.

After our site visits, we returned to our training villages for a week before we went on technical trips. I went with the natural resource coastal tech trip and had a great time. We went to the coast in the Manabi province to see some sample Peace Corps projects, visit an ecological reserve, visit an organic farm, and soak in the coastal culture.

After our technical trips, we returned to the training sites for another week before heading back to Quito for the swearing-in ceremony. I thought I would have a little bit more free time in Quito to buy some stuff and visit people I know, but I didn’t. I did have time to get some seeds for a garden I hope to plant (passion fruit and melon, because they’re tough to find in a seed store Michigan).

We had our swearing-in ceremony on Wednesday morning, a bagel breakfast at the Peace Corps office in the late morning (I wouldn’t call it brunch because they started lunch at 12:30, so it was clearly a breakfast), a barbecue lunch, a pick-up basketball game between the new volunteers and those who came in to celebrate our swearing-in, a brief break to run errands, and then a celebration that night. The 12-hour bus to my site left at 6:00 a.m. So I decided to pull and all-nighter in hopes of crashing for the majority of the bus journey, waking up sporadically to catch bits of the bad action movie the bus officer decided to play.

The plan worked to perfection, except that, instead of action, it was a bad comedy. That, and nobody else was awake between 3:30 and 4:30, making that a lonely hour.

Now, I am at my site for the next two years. All of the volunteers have said it goes by really quickly. Let me think back to where I was two years ago today. Doing some iPhoto-assisted research, I see that I was in Washington, D.C., with a program from the Michigan Business School, sitting in on a meeting with Senator Carl Levin. That doesn’t seem like so long ago.