A Beautiful End to Training

This has been a blog entry that is a long time in coming, and I apologize to all the readers that it is so late. I have wanted to relate the events that happened at the end of my pre-service training during the month of October, 2009. Training, though meant to ease the transition between life in America and life in rural Guatemala, is still always a difficult time in many ways; many volunteers who finish their service say that training was more difficult than any other stage of the process. It is the beginning of the cultural adjustment, when the culture shock is strongest, a stage with a very hectic schedule, a very integrated family living situation, and a tight leash from the administration. All of these challenges did make training very hard for me, but I’d like to present the following vignettes which made me feel like it was all worth it. Few and far between as they may be, the following are the wages of the Peace Corps Volunteer:

1. In the post of September 19, 2009 I mentioned that during training one other trainee and I were working with a COCODE (community development council) on an ecological park in the training town. We had three meetings with the COCODE: in the first, we tried to assign each member of the COCODE a specific area of responsibility based on the group’s needs and the individual’s interests and talents; second, we tried to define a short-term work plan for the group; and third, we accompanied the group in a meeting following up on the work plan. The group had had a 50-page strategic plan for the park done by the group Asociación Sotz’il, an indigenous-rights group, but Don Edy, president of the group, remarked at the end of our final meeting, “Asociación Sotz’il came and wrote us a plan. But they never sat at the table with us to plan together. And that’s why I think that your presence has been more helpful for us than theirs.” There, I hope, is the essence of Peace Corps – not doing work for others, but sitting down with others to work together toward development.

2. My swearing-in speech was very well-received, by Peace Corps and Embassy administration, by my fellow Volunteers, and by the Guatemalan families present. The speech brought me a little bit of fame, and it was fun to be the center of attention for a while.

3. Despite often not wanting to, I spent a lot of time during training playing with the two boys of the house, aged six and ten. I established a lot of trust with them, always tried to give them advice and even scolded them occasionally. On the last day, the ten-year-old gave me a card in which he apologized for doing all the things which I had scolded him for, proclaimed his brotherly love for me and told me that I was his best friend.

4. My host father, with whom I spoke very little, on my last night in the house knocked my socks off when he came up to me asking forgiveness for not pursuing a better relationship with me (at which time I also asked forgiveness from him for at times not wanting to speak to him), and then thanked me for all the time I spent with his kids.