I’ve been here three weeks and this the first time I’ve been able to sit down and write for the blog. Things have been strange and I am going from day to day. Given things a day at a time, breaking it down like that, though Spanish, for example, is not easy, it’s do-able.
I am now in my first full day with my new host family. I’ve been speaking (let’s imagine that I actually held up some of my end of the conversation) with my host mom’s 10 year old son, Jave. I actually haven’t seen his name spelled…or anyone elses…so I’m guessing. He has a truck n inner-tube and spends his afternoons tubing down the local, dirty, trickle of a “river” running along one side of the town.
We have just had our first set of exams. I passed. Now we’re in the second term of training—5-1/2 weeks of heightened Spanish and our first technical training sessions. We’re learning how to do community diagnostics according to the Peace Corps hand book called PACA, fondly referred to as “the PACA book.” Yesterday we got the last set of injections for a while. I think there is one more rabies shot coming and we’ll be done. I’ve lost track of how many injections we get. Over a dozen. We just line up and get them. One gets over one’s aversion to having our skin pierced and bruised upper arms.
So much has happened I’d bore you with details if I tried to recount all of it. Each day seems an age long and I feel as though I’ve been away for months. Meeting people one cannot understand, moving into their homes, meeting all the relatives, not remembering the cascade of names or being able to tell who’s a family member and who is just visiting, sitting alone at a table set just for us while we eat a three course meal beautifully prepared and presented are just a sample of day one with, what?, almost 40 to go? We’ll be crammed with enough Spanish to move us up two to three levels on an international scale I can’t remember (and am too lazy to look up at the moment.) We’ll learn how to make fero-cement tanks, latrines, efficient wood stoves, potable water systems and more. We’ve been filled with UN HDI (human development index) statistics that float in space with no context to any other measure and unidentified floating points such as “poverty line,” which remains undefined (i.e. compared to whom?) which appear on the tests…for which, of course, we all dutifully cram for two days before, knowing, now, that things learned this way have a notoriously short retention time. It’s just the hoops we jump through on our way to, in my case, I have only a fuzzy idea where. We in Appropriate Technologies have the understanding that our group is new and experimental and that is exciting and one of the things that keep me going.
It is daunting to think that I will be put into a community by myself and be expected to work my way into that community’s heart and mind with what we know will be insufficient language to perform a diagnostic to find out what we might do for that community…or, rather, in Peace Corps’ terms, what we might help that community discover they need and help them to get that project off the ground as we then get out of the way. I feel that to be unlikely from this distance, yet volunteers do it successfully from seemingly insufficient starts like mine all the time. In our case, about 52 volunteers each 6 months begin the same journey I am on…though, if our group is an example, few will have as much language to learn as I have. Yet I seem to be doing well, actually advancing with the language. A big part of this seems to be getting out of one’s own way. It reminds me of the saying that life is hard and gets easy when one simply accepts that it is hard and gets on with living it.
3/26/11
Today we met community members, often young women alone in the house with their children but also a Hatian, perhaps in the DR illegally, a wealthy hardware store owner living in a grand home at the end of a street of poor people of which she has provided 5 with jobs, and my own doña on the porch of her small home. Her accent is so strong (from the Cibao valley) I can understand almost none of what she says to me. I find myself nodding in agreement and smiling at the wrong times. This is an exercise in the style of the community analyses we’ll be doing in our communities. I’m finding language the greatest problem but other problems that I think are systemic and basic are highlighted, too. I think it will be hard to make this system work. To understand a community I think one would Have to have lived there but that runs the risk of that person being such a product of that community he/she wouldn’t recognize its uniqueness.
The town from the mountain rim
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