Training Work Update

I feel like I should provide an update as well about my work as a Municipal Development Trainee 1 ½ months in to Peace Corps training. Training is hectic and busy, juggling a bunch of different calendars all at once. It will be quite a shock to get out to my site and not know what to do with myself in November. At least it’s still nowhere near as busy as college for me; if I didn’t have a 6- and 10-year-old to play with two or three hours a day, I would actually have a very nice schedule.

The Municipal Development Trainees meet up with the Food Security and Agriculture Marketing Trainees once a week to receive cultural, medical, security and historical training about Guatemala. Then us Municipal Development Trainees have an additional meeting or two per week to talk about our technical topics. What is our technical? Well, it consists of a couple of different things. Our main objective as Volunteers will be to strengthen municipal planning and women’s offices as institutions, and to work with citizens’ groups, strengthening them as well and encouraging healthy relationships between the groups and the offices. So we are talking a lot about organizational development and strategic planning. It isn’t learning water management in semitropical forests, but it is actually something which is probably going to help me a lot in whatever job I have in the future. With our offices and citizens’ groups, we will be primarily training them and guiding them in processes of establishing themselves, establishing strategic direction and plans, and project development, fundraising and management. I know it doesn’t exactly sound like what you think of as Peace Corps, but I actually am very excited to be learning about it and hopefully in the future I’ll be excited to do it.

All of the trainees are broken up into groups of four, approximately, based on their Spanish level. Each group lives in a separate town. This model of training is only used in some Peace Corps countries and is called Community Based Training. The idea is to not establish an American bubble during training, but get you more into the local culture in order to ease your transition into your site. I’m in the high Spanish level, so we are expected to accomplish something substantial during our training months. I’ve been working with one other trainee in our planning office on various things, but the most exciting is a citizen proposal to establish an ecological park in some mountains just outside the town. It’s supposed to protect mostly virgin forest (although some areas are farming, orchards, etc. in order to teach people about agriculture), Mayan culture in the area, which is tied to the land, and draw tourists to pay the bills. It’s a great idea, but my companion and I have some serious doubts about whether it is financially feasible. We’ve scaled the mountain in the park (which, trust me, was not at all easy. We went up in a big group, and the architects and the Americans struggled mightily, while the farmers sped up and down the steep, tiny paths like it was nothing.) and done various types of analyses of the project. It’s not either of our specialties, however, and we do wonder some of the time whether we are qualified to be the trainers in this case. In any case, it’s a very interesting project and we will try to help by training them how to develop their own citizen organization and improve their project proposal for grant writing.

As you read this I’ll be in the western highlands with the Municipal Development Trainees visiting Volunteers in the field. We’re hoping to learn directly from them and also get an idea of what our lives are going to be like in 1 ½ months when we’re out by ourselves in our sites. Stay tuned for an update on that experience.