entretenimiento

I realize that I have briefly mentioned training, but haven’t really explained what I’ve been doing day-to-day in my training sessions. We spend 9 hours Monday-Friday training in our communities or at the training center (plus Saturdays training at the University of La Agraria). Although it has been very energy and time-consuming, training has been worthwhile so far, and I feel like I have been learning a lot. All of the Peace Corps staff who train us have master’s degrees and are certainly qualified. In only 3 weeks, I have learned an abundance of Spanish, technical, and cultural knowledge.

My Spanish classes are about 4 hours, 4 times a week in either my home, or in a fellow classmate’s host-family’s house. I am in the intermediate-advanced Spanish class with two other girls, Meg and Sara. All of the Spanish teachers call us Charlie’s Angel’s because we are the only group with 3 girls. Our teacher, Isabel, is Charlie. Isabel works with us on conversation, culture, a little bit of grammar, and overall suggestions on integrating into the community. We often have homework which requires us to interview our families about an aspect of their family our culture. I know that I still have a lot to learn, but I think (hope) that my language skills are improving!

Depending on the day, I eat lunch at home, or my madre gives me lunch in a “tuper” (what they call tuperware) to bring to the training center. After lunch, we usually break up into group sessions with Salud, Agua, or Medioambiente (Health, Water, or Environment). In my health group, I meet with the 15 other health volunteers and my two trainers, Jorge, a psychologist from Cuzco, and Javier, a nutritionist from Lima. Jorge and Javier facilitate sessions on topics such as non-formal education, early childhood development, community analysis, health infrastructure in Peru, Peru’s Ministry of Health, etc.. In less than 3 weeks, I feel like I have learned more than I could ever know about the health conditions in Peru and how to support the health and healthy environment of a Peruvian community. And I still have 2 months left!

One of the aspects I like most about our technical training is that the trainees help co-facilitate the sessions. For example, one of our fellow health trainees has a degree in nutrition, so he helped facilitate the session on early childhood nutrition. Next week, because of my background, I am going to help facilitate a session on leadership and communication.

In addition to technical and language training, we also have participated in various sessions which will help us better integrate into the community. We have had debates on approaches to development, sessions on gender analysis and development, information gathering and analysis, medical and security safety in Peru, etc.