Week 5-See ya after Tech Week

              

 Bueno. It’s been awhile, but been super busy and sick. Started out feeling bad last Thursday, went to the lab on Friday, did Cipro for 3 days to no avail, followed by these next 5 days on an antiparasitic and another pill to help with digestion to encourage me to eat more to gain back the minimal weight I lost. Dramamine is a beautiful thing too. Now that the bad news is out of the way and getting better here’s the good stuff. More than a month into Training and the Community Garden is looking great. Just transplanted the tomatoes with the help of the local youth (as shown).  Good age and gender mix. They are all a huge breath of fresh air on Sundays when we are just about to start another week. My training group is a little front-loaded in the sense that we have our informal meeting  (playing games and working in the garden) on Sunday, then work on the garden with our Sector Field Director on Monday, then formal youth meeting on Tuesday. Peace Corps charlas and sessions are usually on Wednesdays and Fridays, so you see how it starts to add up a little. This Wednesday the topic was Coping with Stress-somewhat appropriate given my current condition. It’s been a pretty steady diet of steamed veggies and crackers for the last couple of days. They gave us some great “recipies from home” ideas in the Coping Packet, but need peanut butter and quick-cooking oats and not sure how easy those will be to find. Hint…hint…hint J Also baked our first version of the coconut pineapple cake we decided on for our youth baked good. All the youth loved it despite the rushed baking hours before the meeting, but everyone agreed that it might even be too sweet (Hard to imagine right?!)

         It is becoming more and more clear that Training is not really anything like time at post or in site. Volunteers in the sessions have made it incredibly clear that it will be rural. The constant check-ins by Peace Corps staff, which are primarily for project purposes and to check on group dynamic and wellbeing, do not happen nearly as often since it’s just you.

Some fun moments: My family and I made pizza this weekend after the PC sessions. The typical Nica cheese is super dry and salty, but there are places that sell quesillo, which is like mozzarella. Unfortunately, these places are not open on Saturdays when I am looking for the last ingredients. But, there is creamy block cheese in the Pali, the Nica Walmart, so we improvise. Everyone in the family was watching me knead dough and Dona Lysett and my host sister were masters at veggie chopping for the homemade salsa. It definitely felt a little like home. I forgot how much baking is a part of my routine and how relaxing it can be to follow a recipie and make something I can eat. We used the new improved oven and it was a resounding success! Even with my family loading every piece they ate with packets of ketchup (yes, ketchup is for more than just hotdogs here).

          On a different note, Melissa has decided that I am the chief when it comes to braiding hair and all hair styles. So several times a week, she’ll stand in front of me with her head just out of the shower and her comb in hand, ready to go. This is hilarious given my lack of girly genes and given that my only experience with girly hair stuff is my own head.

          Wilmer, my host brother, and I were sick most of the last 5 days. He had major migraines and came home from school so the 2 of us created a bit of a sick fort on the back patio porch area. Melissa even gave me her butterfly pillow to fall asleep with to make me feel better. Very cute.  When we weren’t on the patio, most of the time the two of us will be chilling in front of the TV watching the World Cup. Wilmer and the rest of the guys want Spain and anyone but Ireland to win, so of course I side with Ireland.  I can actually understand most of what the announcers are saying…especially when there is a goal J

Two weeks now with the new Spanish professor. She is awesome!! She helped me relax about missing class to go to the lab and helped talk to my family about diet changes for when I was sick. She also has two little kids of her own and is very no-nonsense, but at the same time talks with me about the cartoon and superheroes shows her kids like to watch. She also takes us to different places, like Jinotepe, to practice outside the classroom. There was a supermarket with CHOCOLATE CHIPS!! WOOHOO!! Really expensive here though. The prof also did a great job prepping us for the mid-cycle training interview.

         So the way it works is PC  does an initial interview in Spanish to gage your level for training, then another one mid-cycle to determine how you are progressing, then a final one before you go to site. In addition to that, we are also headed to Field Days for a week, which is a little like the field trips in Costa Rica. We are going to different sites that currently have volunteers (don’t know specifics yet because it’s only happening Monday-there’re like 4 days jeez J) and be doing projects that we would not be able to do in our training towns. It’s also a little teaser mid-way through training to get us thinking about real-site life.  End of Field Days on Thursday is the Site Fair where we hear about all the potential areas and then it gets pretty downhill from there. Every couple of weeks, the Training Staff meet at Roundtables to talk about everyone’s progress and the topic turns more into selecting and fitting sites for everyone when we get back with 5 weeks left. We get our sites by Week 9 because we actually go to our sites for a week before coming back to finish up all the training projects and get sworn in. Whew! Poco a poco. Needless to say, my big-picture brain is having a little trouble taking it a day at a time with all these big schedule things coming up. It has been an emotional training for me as the cultural adaptation is normalizing, which leaves room for me to try to overachieve. Have to remind myself to sit on my hands sometimes and that I don’t always have to be doing something, since most of the time the best things happen when I’m not already doing stuff. It’s a constant struggle, but it also helps when the current volunteers validate my perspective with their experiences.