What they heck am I actually doing here?

It’s probably about time I explain what I actually do here. I’m sure you’re all a little confused about that especially since I tend to only tell the stories about the exciting stuff. Not that my Peace Corps training is completely uninteresting, but I’m sure you’d all rather hear stories about scorpions and “caca de vaca” before stories about my actual “job”.

What am I really doing in Peru? I’m in the middle of an intense training program to prepare me to become a “development worker”. At the end of 11 weeks, I will swear in as a Peace Corps Volunteer. At that point I move off to a very rural site where I will live and work for the next two years. Over that period of time I will be trying to integrate with my community while I work on small business development, and focus on sustainability.

What exactly will I be doing? It depends. (Peace Corps’ favorite response). Honestly I don’t have a clue where in the country I’ll be going, or what kinds of groups I’ll be working with. That all depends on what site they assign me to and I won’t find that out until August 3rd.

In the meantime, I’ll explain a little bit more about training and what I’m currently working on. We have class from 8-5 Monday through Friday, and most of our Saturdays we have half days at La Agraria. A normal week consists of a variety of classes given at the training center, our homes, and various places in our communities. The topics covered include the following: Safety & Security, Medical, Peruvian Culture & History, Technical Training (Small Business), and of course Spanish. On average we have language class 4 days a week at 4 hrs/day. In addition to the time we spend at the training center we have a handful of out of class assignments. Below is a description of the most important ones…

CDA – Community Development Activity: We have to go our neighborhoods and find out all the information we can about them. The two analysis tools we use the most are FREEHOP and SWOT (FREESOP AND FODA in Spanish). The first of the two is a way to look at our communities by studying; family, religion, economy, education, health, organizations, and politics. The other looks at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of our communities. Completing these studies allows us to get a better understanding of the current state of our communities, and what their real needs are. From there we have the task to plan and complete an activity that will positively affect our community.

Some groups are teaching English classes, another is doing a park clean up, and a third is painting the local comedor (Peruvian soup kitchen). My group has decided to paint a world map on one of the walls at the local school. We are getting the neighborhood children to help us paint. When it is completed we will be giving talks to the students about geography.

DCC – Developing Community Contacts: This assignment is about going around our communities and meeting new people. The point is to become comfortable talking with people in our towns and to find mentors within our specialties (Small Business). We should be meeting with our contacts at least once or twice a week and we have to keep a journal about our experiences.

Journal – I’m supposed be to keeping a diary that I write in every night in Spanish. I was doing really good keeping up with this but just as I’ve been too busy to do everything else, I’ve been kind of slacking here too.

Spanish Homework – Every night we get some type of Spanish homework. It can range from grammar exercises in our work books to asking our host family random questions about Peruvian culture and having to discuss their responses the next day in class.

Presentations on Departments – Peru has departments instead of states. We each have to give a presentation on one of the departments of Peru. We are responsible for talking about the history, architecture, places of interest, customs, dress, food, music and dance. Luckily we do these in groups as well. But it is a pretty serious presentation complete with local food and us dancing dressed in local clothing.

La Agraria: Large agricultural university we attend on Saturdays to learn about organic gardens, natural compost, small animal husbandry, and honey bees.

Field Based Training: See next section for a better understanding of this one….

OK…. for those of you who read all the way down here, do you understand a little bit better about what I’m doing here? I hope so. But don’t think that’s all, in addition to everything above, I have to make sure I spend time with my host family, I’m trying to stay healthy, and I’m attempting to run 3 days a week after classes. It’s not until after all of this that I even get to think about having a social life.

So I’m busy to say the least but as much of a pain as training can be, I really think all this hard work and these activities are helping me prepare to go to site. We’ll see soon enough….