Field-Based Training

This past week we Municipal Development Trainees visited northwest Guatemala for our Field-Based Training. This was an opportunity for us to go out and see current Municipal Development Volunteers to find out what kinds of things they are doing, what successes and failures they’ve had, and what their lives are like. It was also a big opportunity for all of us Trainees and our Associate Peace Corps Director (APCD) to get to know each other better. Our APCD is the one who places us in our various sites, so it’s important to get to know him so that he’ll be able to place us in a place that’s comfortable for us with coworkers that we can get along with and a job that matches our skills.

We visited five Volunteers’ sites and passed through another one. Though they’re located in the same part of the country, they are all very different. They ranged from very hot to pretty cold, almost exclusively Ladino to a famous Mayan town, Todos Santos Cuchumatanes, which is the only town in the country where men still wear traditional dress. By the way, their traditional shirt and pants are awesome – I can see why they wear it there. If I lived there, I would definitely try to wear them too. Some of the sites were quite developed, communities with lots of remittance money or close to cities that generate jobs, and one was 5 hours from the nearest city, accessible only by very windy dirt roads, where you couldn’t buy purified water. Generally, though, living conditions were pretty nice. One volunteer even had an apartment that would be considered modern and good in America. The term “Posh Corps” is sometimes applied to places like Eastern Europe, where Volunteers live pretty well. The volunteers’ living arrangements weren’t Posh Corps (except for that one, maybe) but they were a far cry from the living in a hut without any kind of water or electricity that the name Peace Corps conjures. We Muni volunteers have it easier than others, too. We work in municipal offices, so we have to live in the municipal cabeceras, as they are called. Guatemalan municipalities are really more like American counties than cities (at least if you are from the West Coast, in New England there exist “towns” that are more like these municipalities) in that they cover large swaths of land and there are a number of distinct communities within them. Generally there is one large town, the cabecera, which is the municipal seat, and a bunch of aldeas, or villages up to three hours away from the cabecera. Volunteers in other programs, especially agricultural ones, often work and live in aldeas, which are generally poorer and more indigenous than the cabeceras. They also have many fewer amenities, generally.

Some of the more interesting projects we’ve heard about: starting a radio station and/or hosting a municipal radio show, building a library or getting it stocked with books, painting maps of the world/country/department/municipality on blank walls, improving municipal grant-writing, a million different types of trainings and guidance for women’s groups and community development councils, budgeting issues, conducting a census, doing serious GIS analysis in order to inform municipal decision-making and strengthen their project proposals.

The guessing game about who goes to what site has begun in earnest. Our APCD was always dropping hints and asking questions about what kinds of things we liked/didn’t like: hot/cold, Ladino/Maya, first volunteer in a site/second/third, women’s office/planning office, close to Antigua/close to a city/isolated, community participation work/planning office type work, etc. All of these questions and hints which were given out to some trainees pretty much put us into a frenzy toward the end of the week. Unfortunately, we won’t know anything more until October 8th, when they announce the sites where we’ll be placed.

This week we got to do a lot of the bonding which we would’ve done had we had the old setup of training – everybody lives in the capital city and meets up every day for class. That was nice. It was especially nice for me to spend more time with men, since I’m in a training site with only women and often times I spend more time with women anyway. I think we’ll have to wait to see where we are all placed until I find out who my closest friends are going to be, but now I have a much better base with a lot of the training class (and some of the current volunteers). Our hang out time was very American, going out to eat tacos, Domino’s, fried chicken, cake, etc. We even got to have some beers which is a luxury seldom afforded here, and got to dance in a bar once. Hooray for getting to have a little American bubble.