Well everyone, I’ve officially visited my
new site that I will be living at for the next two years. I’m still in training for another two weeks
or so, so it was only a four-day visit, but it was enough to prepare me for my
service. Every volunteer’s service is
different, and living situations are dependent on where your site is. My site, for example, is in the ‘campo,’
loosely translated to out on the farm. I
will be living in a tiny pueblo of less than 800 people about a 30 minute bus
ride from the closest town with indoor plumping and paved streets. It was a bit of a shock when I first arrived,
but after four days I started to see myself being able to call my new house
home. The luxuries I’ve gotten used to
in my training site here, such as indoor plumping and an actual bed have been
nice, but I will truly start living the life of a PC volunteer on November 2nd! So now I guess the only thing left to do is
to give you a bit of a tour of my new house incase anyone ever wants to visit!
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| The view from my town |
When you walk into my front
yard, you have to step over the constant stream of water flowing down the hill
(caused by rain or people up the hill washing various things). The front of my house consists of a dirt
floor porch, an entrance to the living room, the kitchen, and my room on the
left. If you walk in the living room,
you will see two tables on your right, and a few plastic chairs on your
left. The tables on your right have a
TV, stereo, and phone, and also serve as my dining room table. Next to the chairs on the left is another
card table, and two doorways to my host family’s rooms. One has a door, and the other a sheet. The kitchen looks to be a more recent add on,
and is through the living room on the right.
The kitchen consists of a wood burning stove (a concrete platform with
two holes above where you can put your pots/pans. Our kitten usually hangs out on top of the
wood pile below the stove table. To the
left is the slanted wood plank where you can cut meat and veggies, and also do
the dishes. The water then runs down the
plank to a bucket outside the house.
There is also a bench in the kitchen too. To get the backyard you can walk around
front, or take the door through the living room. In the backyard you have the currently out of
service outhouse (have to use the neighbors for the time being), a random shack
that maybe once was a chicken coop (our chickens just run around free in and
around the house), a pig pen with two pigs, a previous volunteers garden, and
the little partly enclosed area for doing laundry/showering (by cover of sheet
and towel). Also, word to the wise, if
you ever plan on using the outhouse at night, bring a flashlight. Our clothes line is barbed wire, so never fun
to run into. For some reason it took me
two times to figure that one out.
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| My pigs in the backyard, right near the ´shower´
And finally, my room. Well…I’ll just show a couple pictures of that. I do have my own room though, so that’s nice! I don’t have my own bathroom like I do now, or a mattress thicker than about a centimeter, but it more than I was expecting when I applied to the PC, so I can’t complain!
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Overall,
I’m pretty excited, a bit nervous, and pretty much ever other emotion you can
think of. I live way up in the
mountains, and it is absolutely beautiful!
My site has a nice dirt and gravel field to play fútbol, and plenty of
coffee plants! I definitely need to
practice my soccer to get up to par with host brother and his friends, but
until then I’m just going to have to get used to getting schooled by a bunch of
ten year olds (well, to be fair, one of them was twelve). And while this is not relevant to my site
visit, something I learned today in my training town is that you should always
wear sunscreen when going to church. You
never know when you will end up going on a half an hour parade through the
streets of your pueblo with a band and people dancing around a statue of the
patron saint of your town locked to the top of a table.
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