Field Training

Halfway through Pre-Service Training, and we just got back from a week of field training, traveling around the country visiting current volunteers and getting an idea of what life as a PCV will be like. We went north to a province near Quiché (where Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú is from), and stayed in a park/forest preserve up in the mountains around the city, where a current Volunteer has been working for 2 years. I was drawn to this site for some reason, and found myself imagining what life might be like if I am assigned to this park. Because one of us will be – this volunteer is Closing Service in April, right after my group swears in as Volunteers and moves to our new sites, so one of us will be taking her place. So it wasn’t just me – all of us were sizing up the place and each person wondering if this is the kind of site they’ll get or not. But besides speculating about who Flavio (our Program Director) will put in this park come March, we were having our heads crammed full with lots of training lectures and activities, and our tummies crammed full with more tamalitos than I like remembering that I ate. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, those little steamed corn dough nuggets wrapped in leaves were there. Somehow, they’re so addictive, even though they’re so bland…
Part of our stay in this first park was spent hanging out with the kids in the local village school, teaching them how to make arts and crafts from recycled materials. We have learned, and taught the kids, how to make piggy banks, decorative flowers, and even walls of buildings from plastic bottles and chip bags; and coasters, mats, and origami from random used paper. Pretty neat, and the kids in that school were SO well behaved and fun! The picture below is Yovani, the PCV’s counterpart, giving us a sample of the interpretive tour he and the other guides give on the park trails. That was neat, to see/hear interpretation done in Spanish by a man who obviously cares a whole lot about the shrinking forests.
Part 2 of the field-based training trip was staying in a little preserve/community park near Lake Atitlán. Again, there’s a PCV there now but there’ll be a changing of the guard at the end of March, and one of us will take her spot. Tying in with her attempts to improve the environmental interpretation in her park through signage, we had a guy with a doctorate in interpretation work with us for a day… who happens to know someone I know from working in Alaska. What?? I just couldn’t believe that… it’s a small world, folks. I also used my Wilderness First Responder training for the first time: some of the kids from the local high school had come over for fun environmental scavenger hunt activities, and the evening ended in several run-around lawn games – which ended when a few folks took a spill and one kid didn’t get up, saying he hurt his spine. Yikes!!!! So, being the first one to kneel down and immobilize young Juan Carlos’ head to make sure he wouldn’t move and tweak what could be a spinal injury, I sat there for the next hour with my trainer and a few others who were keeping him company and keeping him warm till the doctor arrived to do an official spinal assessment. In the mean time, we chatted: Juan Carlos loves Andean flutes, and plays them, and would like to go to the conservatory in the capital, but being from a family of 7 kids, can’t really ask for more than a high school education (which is more than most Guatemalans do). But the good news is, his back was fine, the doctor gave him an anesthetic when he arrived, and poor Juan Carlos went home for some rest. His classmates all stayed for dinner with us in the Restaurant in the park, though, and we had a little dance party of exchanging styles of dance from the US and Guatemala. Pretty hilarious, especially when Kyle (a fellow trainee) whips out terrible moves like the sprinkler, the grocery shopper, the pizza maker, the dice thrower (and more) in response to traditional Mayan style of dance. Oy. :)
Probably the adrenalin highlight of the trip was the pitstop we made at a park overlooking the Lake itself (Atitlan). The PCV here definitely has the best view in the world, and a park with ziplines to boot! As a bonus for stopping in to learn from him about several training topics, we all were able to do a 2-zipline route in his park, with stunning views of Lake Atitlan from both lines. There are several funny shots of the others in my training group as they come in for a landing. But awkward landings aside, the ride itself is the epitome of grace! I have never felt so like a bird before, since both ziplines stretched several hundred meters over a yawning gully between two mountains on the edge of what is supposedly the most beautiful lake in the world, sending the rider whipping through the air with the definition of a bird’s-eye view.
Non-stop events and a full schedule aside, what this last week has brought to all of us trainees is a sense of things stirring. In visiting all these volunteers, whose lives may become the pattern after which we design our own for the next two years, each of us has been constantly thinking about we’d like those two years of life to be. Will I be near any of the friends I’m making now? Will I be accepted in my community? Will I have to learn a Mayan language, if Spanish is a second language in my host community? Will I find a host family I like well enough to live with for two years, or will I prefer autonomy and move out on my own after the first few months? What will my counterpart be like, since he or she is the person I will work most closely with during my service? Does Flavio know who I am and what I’m good at, and what I’m not, well enough to pick a good site for me? For those of you familiar with The Fiddler on the Roof, this reminds me of the matchmaker song: “Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match, find me a find, catch me a catch!” … and the n the end of the song, when the girls realize it can backfire, too. Feels an awful lot like that right now! Hopefully I needn’t feel apprehensive about it. After all, still two weeks till I even find out where my site will be, and over a month till I move there.
My co-trainee Maria and I getting ready for the zipline!

An environmental interp guide in the first park we visited. He was really inspiring, and will likely be the counterpart for whichever trainee ends up in this park!

The view from the zipline... this is Lago de Atitlan, supposedly the Eighth wonder of the world.