PC: Pre-Service Training Week Five (part two)

Before I write anything about this week, I have to vent. It makes me sick how people treat animals in this country. Boys kill little ones just for sport and Marcos mistreats our puppy all the time. I told him to stop, and he said now that she's growing she needs to be pushed around, not loved. I told him that's like saying once a child can walk you need to stop loving it. WTF. Kicking dogs is a regular pastime for Salvadorans. Why does no one treat animals with any sort of respect? Just because they cannot talk does not mean they cannot feel. The puppy is endlessly loyal and will do anything for this family, and Marcos treats her like crap. I hate it. It's a good thing that Roberto at least loves animals and treats them well. 

Back to the regularly scheduled program...

Thursday we were all a little like zombies, just thinking about free weekend and tired from too much class and Immersion Days and life in El Salvador. We coasted through our sessions on the Emergency Action Plan (EAP) for El Salvador and HIV/AIDS. Our EAP will be active and we will be in "standfast" for February 1-3 during the presidential elections, meaning that we cannot travel. When we get to site we will start filling out a detailed locator form for the security officer that includes maps and contact information and emergency transportation information. Our service may get interesting because the presidential elections are next year, and we are overdue for an earthquake and a volcanic eruption. Throw in some floods (the heaviest rains fall in October and November, just in time for our site placement) and we will be EAP pros in no time.


HIV/AIDS is a cross-sector programming priority (CSPP), along with Volunteerism. That means that both COED and Youth Development volunteers work both topics into their community programs and Peace Corps can offer grants for programs with a HIV/AIDS focus. This session was more of a practical session that we could adapt to our communities to educate them about HIV/AIDS, so it was pretty interactive. One activity identified low, moderate, and high risk activities, and another demonstrated how HIV affects the body. It was a good session in terms of applicability because we can basically just translate that session and the other activities they showed us and give a few talks in our communities. Carlos pointed out that it may be necessary to have a lesson on the differences between parasites, bacteria and viruses before even touching on HIV/AIDS because many people will have no idea what they mean.

We finished up the morning with Jenny's session on Monitoring, Recording and Evaluation (MRE). I talked about this before, and this was a session to look at the benefits of MRE - we need to see what we're doing, Peace Corps wants to see it, our community needs to see it, other volunteers can learn from it, our resumés will look better with concrete evidence of work done, and Congress wants evidence of "good" done by Peace Corps. Evidently at some point we will have a conference with our counterparts and all of us will have formal presentations of our projects in our communities and we will have to show data collected through MRE and our future plans for the projects. We also leave reports for the next volunteers who will stay in our sites, and the more information and support we can give them about the successes and failures of our projects, the better. Jenny got really excited about MRE, since it's a new thing. I cannot for the life of me figure out why Peace Corps didn't do it all along. As a volunteer I would want to know the outputs and outcomes of my work, especially knowing that another person would come along to work on projects in my community and there's absolutely no reason for them to have to start from zero.

In the afternoon we worked through our organizational and business case studies as practice for conducting assessments. PC El Salvador is coming out with new Volunteer Reporting Form (VRF) in October, just in time for our site placement, but because MRE is new in El Salvador, we will be creating most of the assessment tools for the reports and adapting the existing ones to the Salvadoran business landscape. Some of our group are really excited for the chance to create tools, but I have to admit that I am not in the least qualified to work on that project.

The afternoon ended with our placements for Field-Based Training. FBT is four days living with a current PCV along with two other trainees and a LCF, working on the PCV's current projects, and leading a class and a charla (session). I will be back in Metapán, though this time with a PCV in an even more rural site. You think Clelia's trying to tell me something? I'm really excited for the different perspective because this PCV has a ton of projects going on, and most of them are COED projects despite the fact that he's in the Youth Development program. El Salvador does a "split training," meaning that we have ten weeks of training, two months in site, then two weeks of technical training. Field-based training was a new  Our group is the first COED group to have Field-Based Training in El Salvador, something they decided based on responses from the Youth Development trainees and requests from old volunteers to have more field experience before having to decide on site preferences.

By the end of the day I was worn out, but I still had to buy food for free weekend and ingredients for banana bread. A group of us made it out to the grocery, then I came back only to work on homework until 11 pm and teach Josiel how to make a bracelet so that he wouldn't distract me while I worked.

Friday our Spanish group continued our preterite and imperfect work through autobiographies and histories of JFK, Grace Kelley, Ghandi, and others. Unfortunately, the septic workers came during class to empty the latrine in front of the office and everything just reeked. We transferred outside, but that's where the huge scary spiders are, so instead of continuing class we ended up pulling down spider webs with a rake and stomping on spiders as big as my hand. Our country director (CD) came to visit soon after, explaining about the upcoming director's conference hosted the El Salvador office. The entire region of CDs will converge in San Salvador for a week-long conference. The director of Peace Corps will visit us during our TFS presentations next week. Our CD is also trying to convince the director to loosen some of the travel restrictions, which would be awesome. We also had one-on-ones with him to get to know us better and see how we're doing. There seem to be an awful lot of little interviews to see how we're doing.

After a speed lunch I grabbed a few eggs and headed over to niña Carolina's to teach our group how to make banana bread. I don't know how we convinced our LCF that this was a necessary Spanish session, but she was all for it. I used an incredibly simple recipe (butter, sugar, eggs, bananas, baking soda, vanilla, salt, flour) and made them repeat the steps after we finished so that I could be sure they had it down. We ate it hot out of the oven and shared with everyone who came into the house.

The last piece of bread disappeared just before 3 pm, and I booked it out of the house to make it back for the van to take us to free weekend. Everyone congregated at the pupuseria and started loading in. I have no idea how we managed to stick so much in the van, and we still hadn't made our pit stop at the grocery store for any necessary purchases. We had decided to split into meals, so each group of three was responsible for one meal and one group got snacks. It ended up working out beautifully and the food all weekend was the best. We have some fantastic cooks in our group, and everyone worked together to get everything made and cleaned up afterward.

We jigsawed ourselves and even more bags back into the van in under thirty minutes, then drove the extra fifteen minutes to the beach house. When the gates opened, there was a collective breath followed by a collective cheer. I was on dinner duty, so once we got settled I started chopping up veggies for pasta sauce and put water on to boil. In my mind dinner was going to be slightly fancier with steamed vegetables and garlic bread, but given that we only had two big pots, I made pasta and chunky sauce and everyone seemed happy with it. It was amazing to finally be able to cook for myself again and to see everyone laughing and relaxed and enjoying just being together with a good meal. We moved seamlessly into cleaning up, which surprised me because I usually end up being the only one cleaning in big groups as everyone finishes and wants to go off to the beach or the pool. The whole weekend surprised me, in fact. The planning worked as planned, the food went off without a hitch, everyone got along, I learned a ton about everyone else and finally got a chance to get to know better some of the group that I hadn't had a chance to really talk to, and everything got cleaned on a regular basis.

The beach house was gorgeous and when we weren't enjoying massive amounts of fantastic food, especially incredible salsa and guacamole on Saturday, we were in the ocean or passing the volleyball or lounging in the pool. From the moment we arrived the music went on and it didn't turn off until we left on Sunday. Each time of day had different music, from breakfast pop to after dinner dance party to late-night jazz. On Friday night, Asiha and Kai even treated us to an impromptu Tahitian dance performance. We have some awesome cooks in our group, and really coordinated teamwork too. In and around the house we had enough space to be together if we wanted and have alone time too, so everyone could just be themselves and enjoy the free weekend. We had a few awkward dance moments, a little bit of conflict that I hope blew over as fast as it happened, and one ocean rescue.

Peace Corps required us to hire a lifeguard for the beach, which was a complete waste of money because we have four life guards in our group and the one time we needed help the guard just watched as the trainee got pulled out beyond the waves and Kai swam out to the rescue. As he came back up the beach exhausted and panting after swimming the trainee back to shore, the guard smiled and commented, "Todo tranquilo." I'm pretty sure Kai just stared in disbelief as he made his way back to the house. While Kai was off saving lives I got partway through the Guide Dog training manual in preparation for the puppy I'm getting at the end of next month (or possibly during PST2 in December).

Saturday night graced us with the most gorgeous sunset. A small group of us watched the pinks turn to purple then to black as we listened to the waves rolling up the beach. We asked what we wanted from Peace Corps, not just what we would say to the staff, but what we actually want. We found shells, made our promises to ourselves and each other, and threw them in the ocean. It sounds corny, but it felt powerful to put voice to my thoughts. Saying it out loud makes it a real goal that I am accountable for. To keep it short and sweet, I want to be confident in my abilities as a leader. I don't want to pretend that I know what I'm doing and blindly plow through; I want to have successfully worked with groups on projects, to have seen projects flourish, to know that I know what I'm doing and I won't screw it up (not that that's ever a sure thing).

I slept outside on Saturday after another dance/pool party on my sleeping pad. I volunteered to sleep on the floor specifically because it meant I could bring my sleeping pad and thoroughly enjoy sleeping on it, which I did. I slept in the open kitchen/dining room rather than in a hammock, which was a good choice as it rained for a few hours around 5 am. The last group made delicious french toast and cut up pounds and pounds of pineapple and papaya for breakfast as everyone lamented our imminent departure. Both Saturday and Sunday some local guys offered short beach rides with their horses, and a few people took them up on their offer. I saved my money and jumped waves instead. We noticed some volunteer lifeguards on the beach and found out that they live near us and go to a different beach every weekend to train and have done for over a year. It's a good idea, but they don't have any gear so the best they could do is prevention because anything serious and they would be out of their league. They were much more attentive than our hired guard the day before, though, and they saved a guy who became exhausted after saving a child pulled out by the undertow. A few more hours of lazy Sunday, then we packed up and were on the road back to Nuevo Cuscatlán. The beach is less than an hour away, so we stopped for lunch to slow our return to town.

I spent part of Sunday writing in cursive because I was admiring another trainee's diary and wishing that I wrote my diary in cursive, so I did. It's cooler to look at but much harder to read. Also, it's about ten thousand times slower to write in cursive because I have to think about how to spell things and how letters are formed, which I never have to do in print. Maybe I'll keep doing it, just to have cool fast cursive. Maybe I'll become a doctor someday and then it will be justified. That's how people become doctors, right? Just start writing in cursive then everything goes downhill from there.

Roberto dropped off the San Antonio and Siete de Marzo crews right before the pupuseria opened, then I alternated between helping out and writing. Roberto made the cilantro rice to great success and has switched from avocado to using guacamole for the burritos and sandwiches. We tried a basic fajita recipe, and Roberto liked it enough to test it out on Monday night (those were better planned and turned out absolutely delicious, so they should be on the menu next Friday). I joined the boys in the back of the pickup to drop off Roberto's sister at the end of the night, enjoying the rush of wind as we stood in the back pretending to fly. I collapsed into bed for a well-deserved sleep.