One week in!

Buenos dias!

I've now been in El Salvador for one week, having left DC (our staging location) last Wednesday morning and arriving in El Salvador at about two in the afternoon that day.

My group (fifteen of us total; ten women and five men, ages 21 [i.e. me] to 28) spent our first two days at Centro Loyola, a retreat facility in Antiguo Cuscatlan, a wealthy suburb of San Salvador. There, we had some basic training sessions (survival spanish, food and water safety, and the illustrious “diarrhea talk”, for example) as well as some downtime to better get to know our group-mates. A particularly memorable bonding experience was an impromptu Zumba class that one group member, who is a certified Zumba instructor, put on.

On Friday we moved in with our training host families, with which we will live for ten weeks during training. Each volunteer is assigned to a different family (with the exception of the one married couple in our group, who live with the same family) in or around the town of Nuevo Cuscatlan, where our training sessions take place. The community I'm in is called 7 de Marzo (named after the date the community was founded fifteen years ago), which is a hilly neighborhood about a ten minute walk from downtown Nuevo Cuscatlan. There are five other PCTs (Peace Corps Trainees) located in “Siete”, another six in downtown Nuevo Cuscatlan, and three in a rural community called San Antonio, which is a bit further afield from the town center.

My host family is very nice. The parents, Lidia and Vidal, are both teachers at the local school (Vidal was also the mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlan from 2001-2003), and they have two children: a daughter, Gaby, who is my age and attends university in San Salvador (it's about an hour commute each way for her to get to class) and a 14 year-old son, Josue, who loves soccer and video games. They feed me very well (lots of rice, beans, interesting fruits, and of course pupusas) and are very easy to talk to and helpful with my Spanish homework. Their house is a very comfortable cement structure with a tin roof and three bedrooms, a bathroom, and a washroom where the pila is located (I'd recommend Googling “pila” if you're unclear what I'm talking about). In the yard they have coconut trees, coffee trees, mango trees, two dogs, and about twenty chickens and roosters (AKA walking alarm clocks). Just last night, my host father hacked a cluster of coconuts off one of the coconut trees and cut a coconut up for me with a machete and let me drink the agua inside. We also have a kitten named Meech ("meech" is more or less Spanish for "meow", as far as I understand). I've never been much of a cat lover, but here, the presence of a cat means the absence of rats and snakes, so I'm more than happy to have a cat slinking around the house.

My host family's house is significantly more modern than those of some of the other volunteers in my group (we even have cable and an internet connection via a USB modem), who are getting used to taking bucket baths and using latrines. A lot of great stories emerge from these types of situations. One girl, for example, had to wait for a turkey to leave her latrine before she could use it. In nine and a half weeks when I go off to my service site, I'll most like live under conditions much more basic than I am now, so I may have some interesting stories of my own. Posh as my current circumstances are, living with my training host family is a great way to practice cultural adaptation and community integration, which are crucial elements of successful Peace Corps service.

On Sunday I attended church with my host family. They drive all the way to the capital to attend Tabernaculo Biblico Bautista, the largest church in the country (it seats about 8,000 people, and on Sundays offers services at 9am, 11am, and 4pm, all of which fill up). My host family is Evangelical Christian, which is not uncommon in El Salvador, where about three-quarters of the population is Catholic and the rest largely Evangelical. Other things I've done with them are play soccer with Vidal, Josue, and Josue's little cousin, and celebrate Lidia's mother's birthday. Both Lidia and Vidal have lots of family members in town, so there are often family gatherings to attend on weekends. Salvadorans tend to have very tight-knit extended families.

For the next nine and a half weeks I'll be doing Spanish classes, Community Contacts (which are meetings with local stakeholders, whose purpose is to practice gathering information from different types of community members), cultural/technical/health/safety training, a community service project, and a couple visits to current PCVs' sites to observe their projects and living conditions. Training is a substantial amount of work, but an essential aspect of Peace Corps, as it delivers the language, cultural, and technical skills necessary for a successful service.

That's about it for now. Obviously I'm not relaying every detail of my life here, but feel free to contact me directly if there's anything you're curious about. I'll try to get some pictures up soon to paint a better picture. Hasta luego!

Introductions!

Hi all --

Welcome to my first Peace Corps blog post. Tomorrow I depart from my home in Northern California to Washington, D.C. for what's called "staging". At staging, I'll meet the other volunteers in my cohort (of which there are 16) and do one day of orientation activities with them led by D.C.-based Peace Corps staff. The next morning, we'll all leave our hotel at about 3 a.m. to catch our flight to San Salvador, by way of Miami. After that, it's ten weeks of in-country training, after which I'll join a small community in rural El Salvador where I'll serve as a Community Organization and Economic Development (COED) Volunteer for two years.

A little bit about myself: I just graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in Political Science and Human Rights. I chose the University of Chicago because of its reputation for rigor, to which it mostly lived up. I grew up in Mill Valley, California, a picturesque suburb just across the Golden Gate from San Francisco. I played baseball growing up, and did some theater as well, and toward the end of my high schools years became active in Democratic politics. I'm a huge San Francisco Giants fan, as well.

Peace Corps entered my radar midway through college when at a used bookstore in Carrboro, North Carolina, I stumbled upon a weathered book written by an MSNBC host whose name I recognized from the TV. The book's sub-title, "How politics is played, told by one who knows the game", piqued my interest, as at the time I was halfway through my summer internship in the Capitol Hill office of my local Congresswoman, and was just becoming interested in the nuances of Washington. So I bought the book.

About 150 pages into Chris Matthews' Hardball (written well before Matthews' program of the same name became a mainstay in progressive households around the country), Matthews offers an anecdote in which he describes a meeting from his Peace Corps service in Swaziland in which American and British officials and the Swazi Minister of Commerce shared in their dissatisfaction with the slow rate of progress in the newly-independent kingdom. It wasn't a remarkable story (Matthews was intentionally describing a relatively mundane event), but the image of a young American working with local partners to figure out how to bring prosperity to an impoverished land made an impression that stuck with me. This fresh little glimmer of inspiration coincided with my budding interest in international affairs (inspired by my coursework, my Hill internship, and the events unfolding in the Arab world), as well as a growing sense of bewilderment at my peers at the University of Chicago who were beginning to aggressively position themselves for jobs on Wall Street. The more I observed my talented, brilliant classmates gravitating toward the sectors with the most lucrative starting salaries, the more troubled I began to feel at the starkness of global inequality, and the more I felt a need to educate myself about it, and address it.

So here I am, two years later, untested, about to embark the first leg of a (hopefully) long career of working toward reducing inequality in this highly unequal world. From time to time, I'll be documenting my Peace Corps journey here in this blog. I hope you get something out of reading it.

Here goes!

Frank

P.S. Since many prospective PCVs are interested in application timelines, here's mine:

8/29/12 - Submitted application
9/17/12 - Received an email from local recruiter giving me a one-week deadline for references to submit their recommendations
10/10/12 - Peace Corps interview at Chicago recruiting office
10/20/12 - Nominated for COED assignment in Latin America, leaving July 2013
Some time in November, 2012: Received legal clearance after submitting my fingerprints via mail
3/25/13 - Invited to serve as a COED Volunteer in El Salvador with a July 23, 2013 staging date
5/2/13 - Received final medical and dental clearance after submitting results from physical and dental examinations