I know that some of you will be excited to see the reappearance of a pickle reference in the title of this blog post, and I also realize that some of you will be thinking “There were pickle references?” but that is OK. Now you have a fun thing to be on the look-out for! I decided that since I am in the middle of week 4 of training (week 5 of being out of country for those of you counting) it would be a nice time to update you on the place that I call home currently. We, the other Environmental Health volunteers and I, all live in a quaint little town called Santa Rita. It is not metropolis by any means, but it is certainly more developed than the sites we will be placed at eventually. Here we have electricity, running water, and a good number of us even have flushing toilets! There are four stores here where I can go get a Gatorade or soda or whatever it may be that I crave. We should probably put some strong limits on “whatever” in this scenario, but they have Snickers and peanut M&Ms so that covers most of my bases…no Dr. Pepper though or sweet tea or BBQ or sweet tea or Key Lime pie or sweet tea or fresh chocolate chip cookies or sweet tea or fried chicken. I feel like that list pretty accurately triangulates my hometown origins, Key Lime pie being the Florida give-a-way. But I digress, back to Santa Rita. It really is a nice town and a beautiful place with mountains, I suppose the non-Floridians in the crowd may call them hills, nearby. I also could not have asked for a better host family here. I live with a an older lady in her 70s that has basically adopted me as her own. I am also her 19th volunteer that she has hosted so I doubt there is much I could do that would culturally shock or confuse her by this point. To give a quick perspective on the size of her family, I did a family tree for some Spanish practice one day and discovered that she has 7 great grand children. I should also mention that when I first arrived I was living with her and her husband who was 80, but unfortunately a week into my training he was transported to the hospital with chest pains and passed away that evening from a heart attack. It was a sad and sobering experience, but also uplifting to see the support of her family, the community, and even Peace Corps during her difficult time afterwards. We all got out of class early to attend his funeral and show support for their family.
What Austin? You have class? Yeah, that’s why I am so busy of course. Here in Santa Rita we have yet to swear-in as Peace Corps Volunteers, so as trainees we have 8 hours of class a day: 4 hours of Spanish and 4 hours of technical training. The technical training has been mostly over soft skills so far, although today we started in on some science. Hydraulic grade lines mostly, but what fun! These 8 hours of classes means that our days are quite full though and so it is hard at times to find the time to write up blog posts but I am trying. We have also had a several days of training that involved visiting volunteers’ sites. During our pre-Santa Rita training we had a day at the site of a nearby volunteer, and week 3 of training we spent visiting separate volunteers’ sites. I should have a post done pretty soon with some pictures of those sites that we got to visit. As for now I will post my first pictures, pictures of Santa Rita! Check back though because in a few days there should be another with the info on my site visit and some pictures from that.
The main drag
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