The Work Begins!

Great News! I have a sitemate, she is from the same program as me. We went through training together only she was at a lower level Spanish and had to stay back for some extra help. She is here with me now in the place of my other sitemate who decided to go home. Peace Corps isn’t for everyone. We will be covering four communities that are within the 36 communities that the Health Center covers. I have begun work in my communities, though it has taken a little while to happen. My work starts with a community meeting that gets organized via talking with community leaders, my counterpart was able to help me with this as I have little knowledge as to who these people are. I met with one community during my site visit in mid July and met with the second one this week Monday. The meeting is a means of presenting my work and how I can be of resource to the community. After this meeting, those that were interested in participating in what I am going to do singed up and from that list I can start my meetings. In an effort to get to know how the people live and to meet the interested individuals on a more personal basis, I have conducted home visits in one community and have plans to cover the next in the coming days. Home visits are a bit more challenging to carry out in rural Guatemala as compared to a community in the states. Communities are divided into sectors usually around 2 or 3 depending on the size of the town. Each sector contains houses scattered throughout the countryside. Some are easy to get to just of the main road, but others require taking the path through the cornfield up and down hills shooing away angry dogs that protect many of the house, it’s not an easy job, but more of an adventure :). I was accompanied by a couple women from the community to help us locate the houses of those on the list and also by a staff member from the health center as I don’t speak the Mayan language spoken here (it’s a work in progress, a very slow progress) and many of the women don’t speak very much Spanish (Spanish is taught in the schools and many attend for only a few if any years of school). After finishing home visits, I will starting working with groups of interested community members, giving charlas or talks and working on health promotion activities.

So I guess you can see by reading all this that things are slowly picking up for me. It still continues to be a slow go, but that’s how things work here. It’s been a challenge to feel productive considering the fact that I used to be busy with school and work. It’s been nice to slow down, though it has been a challenge.