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.

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.