Week 6 & 7 - Verbal Defenestration

Dear All,

Field-Based Training is over…finally. A week of presentations, early mornings, cramped minibuses, and being trotted around the greater Quetzaltenango metropolitan area is finally over. It was great, and I definitely learned a lot, but with such a high-stress/low-privacy situation, it feels good to be back in San Lorenzo, where I again have my own space.

Field-Based Training, or FBT as it’s usually called, is roughly the midpoint of Healthy Schools training. It’s the summit of the three-month slog through procedures, cram sessions, and general orientation to Peace Corps; everything from this point, volunteers assure me, will be downhill in terms of difficulty. Frankly, that’s probably a good thing—I’m kind of missing my snowboard anyway, and look forward to riding gravity to my final destination, the Swearing In ceremony on March 25th. For the moment, I’m going to forget that March 25th really marks the beginning of my two-year commitment.

So more about FBT—I suppose all you nosey types will want to know what that actually entails, besides a tired sentence in an exhausted trainee’s first paragraph. As I mentioned in the last post, I—along with 8 other trainees from my cohort—were placed in Olintepeque, a town not far from Xela (SHAY-la). For those of you who are both nosey and overachievers, you won’t find the name “Xela” on your map; it’s the common nickname for Quetzaltenango, Guatemala’s second largest city. Olintepeque was a fairly nice place, though we really didn’t have much time to hang out and see the sites.

Instead, we spent most of our time in schools throughout the area. Some were in Olintepeque, obviously, but others were miles outside of its borders. Yuna and Christie, the volunteers stationed there (and our gracious hosts for the weekend), have been busy doing what I’ll be doing in a little more than a month, namely coordinating with schools, administrators, students, teachers, and parents to improve health in the area. Naturally they were pretty excited to show us what they’ve been up to, which, as it turns out, is a fuckin’ lot.

Sunday – Drive from San Lorenzo to Olintepeque. Begin preparing for a presentation to be given the next day on the importance of washing hands to 4th graders. Joe discovers that writing legibly on a poster is hard. Joe also discovers the utility in writing in the third person.

Monday – Joe wonders if he’ll shit himself in fear as he waits to give his first presentation in Spanish in Guatemala. Wishing he could go to the bathroom first (just to be safe), he is ushered into a classroom where 30-odd students grin at him expectantly. All Spanish suddenly leaves Joe. He’s sure that ten year-olds never looked so intimidating. Rallying, Joe gives the approximately 20 minute presentation in about 10 minutes, though it took 4 hours to create.

Tuesday – Marginally less likely to crap himself in public, Joe gives a different 15 minute presentation at a magisterio, a school for aspiring teachers on classroom management techniques. Joe quickly realizes that the assembled group of 50 middle-aged adults are not students, but the professors at the school. All Spanish again heaves itself out of the third-storey windows, preferring defenestration to staying and helping Joe be articulate. Joe is left wondering if it’s presumptuous to think he has anything to teach career teachers about classroom management.

.

Wednesday – A final presentation (repeated three times) for parents is given on the recipe for Suero Oral (oral rehydration liquid). Spanish tries to escape, but Joe, using a powerful combination of forethought and lecture notes, manages to keep it roughly immobile.

Thursday and Friday– 12 meetings over two days with education administrators, mayors, and health centers is too much. Joe finds himself fantasizing about three-hour siestas and un-dubbed American filmography.

Saturday – Return to San Lorenzo, begin writing an post that hopefully sounds irreverent rather than jaded. Joe recognizes that he's probably failing.

Aaaaaand scene! No more third person, I swear.

There’s more, of course, and much of it almost seems too foreign to describe—hearing Kiché (Key-CHAY) spoken fluently (and Spanish only by a few), seeing the truly remote aldeas and the traditional Mayan-style of dress known as traje (TRAH-hay) become more common than jeans and t-shirts, and the wind-burned and scabbing faces of school children because the air is too dry and cold (at 8,000+ feet of elevation) for healthy skin maintenance. With almost all of the families, moisturizing lotion is an unaffordable luxury item.

Some parts of it really appealed to me, and it’s perhaps for this reason that I almost exactly described Olintepeque when I was handed my “Site Preference Form”, to help Peace Corps figure out where to place me.

“I want a temperate-to-cool environment, with a significant indigenous population. If possible I’d like to be placed in a middle-sized cabesera (basically, a regional hub) of 5,000 to 10,000 people with easy access to a larger town.”

Of course, I’m sure almost everyone else put the same thing. Add that to the fact that Peace Corps Guatemala has a suspicious track record of placing volunteers in sites almost the polar opposite of what they desired, and  I’m not expecting my site to match up very well to this ideal.

For the most part that’s fine by me. We also have a site partner (a “co-“), and to me that’s way more important. We work virtually side by side for two years, and may be the only breath of familiarity—at least at first—for miles around. Perhaps it’s for this reason that I am way more concerned with a good co- placement than a good site placement. I think that I could be happy with a really difficult site if I had a great relationship with my co-, but even the best site would be terrible if ours was a toxic relationship.

On Monday we had a speed-dating activity to help us discuss work styles and general pet-peeves, which I think to relatively little to change the mental list I had already compiled. Still, it was fun to sit in the park, the trees with their waxy leaves shading us from the harsher afternoon rays, and see all the people who I’ve been missing for the last few weeks. I will say I have a pretty firm list of people who I would be very happy to work with, and an equally firm list of people who I’d despise working with. For now, I’m going to keep both lists to myself, but I’ll find out my co- by next Tuesday. It feels a bit like prom right now: I’m super excited, super nervous, and more than a little afraid I’m going to do something stupid to screw it all up. Can you have two left feet when it comes to work relationships? As someone who’s left footed, would that help me??

Best,
Joe

PS, here’s this week’s link to the accompanying photos: https://picasaweb.google.com/sigrinj/Week6?authkey=Gv1sRgCN_J39ynqN-MkgE#