Well . . . it’s been a little more than a year that I’ve been in Guatemala at this point.  My training group boarded an airplane in the wee morning hours of September 23rd to fly to Miami International and then into Guatemala City’s Aurora International Airport.  I arrived in Washington D.C. on September 21st, as did some other volunteers who lived on the West Coast.  And as we had a few hours in the afternoon to explore the city, I meandered around the National Mall and took a photo of the White House.  The White House looks surprisingly much smaller when viewed from Layfette Park, humble even, an apt analogy for my grand plans on paper to help people in Guatemala compared to my inherent limitations given I would be just one volunteer in a country of about 15.5 million.  I had once lived for a short while in the Washington D.C. area, but never took the time to visit the Capitol or the White House, but somehow this visit seemed apropos to my new life as a Peace Corps Volunteer.   I, and probably some past and present Peace Corps volunteers, were inspired by John F. Kennedy, whose famously once remarked about public service, “For of those to whom much is given, much is required.”. We Americans, on average, have a standard of living that is much higher than the rest of the world, and many of us have been very fortunate in terms of educational opportunities and it is important to figure out how we can give back.  Below is a photo I snapped of the White House shortly before leaving for Peace Corps Service in Guatemala:

I and my fellow Peace Corps Trainees (PCTs, we were just trainees at that point until we got sworn-in as bonafide Peace Corps Volunteers after training) spent part of September 21st and September 22nd in a training session consisting of a brief introduction to Peace Corps and participating in several “ice breakers” which facilitated our getting to know each other.  I had first thought about Peace Corps service when the media was covering the 1983-1985 famimine in Ethiopia, pop-artists were collaborating on the famous “We Are the World” song and I knew that I would at some point go to Africa to “help people there”.  When applying for Peace Corps service I wrote down that I had been thinking about Peace Corps service for more than 25 years, though I applied for Spanish speaking countries as I already spoke some Spanish (which made me a modestly hot commodity as a volunteer in a hospital in my hometown!). During Staging (Peace Corps lingo for the brief paperwork/training/meet your fellow trainees activity before heading overseas) in a hotel in Washington D.C. they wrote down our “interesting personal facts” on pieces of paper, mixed them up and we had to match the fact with the person and of course somebody had to find the volunteer that had been contemplating Peace Corps service for 25+ years!  (As the average age of Peace Corps volunteers is around 25, a good hint would have been that you couldn’t have first thought about Peace Corps when you were born!).  We also were asked to explain to our fellow PCTs on a couple different occassions our mind’s eye perspective of why we chose Peace Corps and why we want to serve Guatemalans during Staging and Pre-Service Training (PST or the 11 weeks of intensive training in our country of service before we head-off to where we’ll live for the next two years.).   Below is a picture during PST in Peace Corps headquarters in Santa Lucia Milpas Altas about an hour’s drive from Guatemala City.

Discussing our motivations for service was a very good way to get to know our fellow PCTs (little did I know that we would become as close as family during training!).  Also, by discussing our motivations for service it helped us process why we had all decided to take that big airplane ride from Miami to Guatemala City.  I didn’t have trouble relating my decision to others as I had volunteered in Antigua Guatemala, some 16 years ago for a duration of three months in an orphanage for children with disabilities, and thus already knew a little about the health issues that Guatemalans face, such as the high prevalence of chronic malnutrition amoung the rural indigenous Mayan populations.  If you’re headed-off somewhere in the world to start Peace Corps service, (and as you’ll probably have a lot of time on that long plane flight out of the U.S.!) it might be a good idea to write down your motivations for service, maybe as part of a diary during Pre-Service Training.

Below is the wonderful host family I stayed with during my 11 weeks of Pre-Service Training:

And this is some of the gracious host family I am currently staying with in my site (“site” is Peace Corps slang for the town we live in for our two years of service, thus a PCV (Peace Corps Volunteer) might say to another, “I’m going back to my site after my vacation.”)

The first Peace Corps Volunteer I got to meet in person was a RPCV (Returned Peace Corps Volunteer) who had served in the Dominican Republic and answered questions and described her service during Staging in Washington D.C..  I felt an odd-sense of instant familiarity with, and liking of this stranger . . . a feeling that would manifest itself again and again as I got to know my fellow trainees.  It’s been like a scene out of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind during which people from different walks of life were all mystically, and compulsively, driven to a remote site in Montana where an alien spaceship would land.  Such was us, from almost as many different states and backgrounds as there were trainees, and with little chance of meeting, to say nothing of getting to know each other, in ordinary life, we had all been drawn to Guatemala by an indescribable force.  Below is a picture of two newly minted Peace Corps Volunteers in my training group celebrating with cake and ice cream our swearing-in almost a year ago.  Here in Peace Corps Guatemala we call our different training groups “Bak’tuns” which is a reference to the bak’tuns of the Mayan Calendar system which are cycles of 144,000 days or about 394.26 years on the Gregorian calendar.  My training group that arrived in September 2015 is Bak’tun 6 and the group of Maternal and Child Health Volunteers which will arrive in Spring 2017 will be Bak’tun 9.

Although we are still a year from finishing our service, I think that some of us are thinking about “more Peace Corps”, be it a third year extension, a 6 to 12-month tour as a “Peace Corps Response Volunteer”, or maybe re-enlisting in another country.  Who knows?  Maybe even my decades old plans for service in Africa haven’t hit their expiration date yet! 

 Below is a picture of the newly refurbished volunteer lounge at Peace Corps Headquarters in SLMA (Santa Lucia Milpas Altas) a short  drive from the ever popular UNESCO world heritage site of Antigua Guatemala.  The new extra big mailboxes for volunteers are a plus!

1,428 total views, 1 views today