Perceptions thus far

This morning's technical activities were a vast improvement on the ones of the past couple weeks of training, as they involved...actually studying the environment. All the environment Trainees got dropped off at different altitudes on mountain farms and had to explore, make a map, and figure out from the owner some information about the farm owner. Some people had some trespassing issues, but our farmer told us our instructor had talked to him ahead of time and he was glad to talk to us. He had inherited the farm from his great-grandparents and was growing, depending on the season, broccoli and cauliflower, or green pepper, tomatoes, and zucchini. We came in the middle of a pesticide spraying, and were aghast at the lack of face mask on the pesticide applier, but so it goes. We romped around the farm for a couple hours, and then came home for Spanish class.

Spanish class is sort of unsatisfying and I'm hoping I can get placed into a higher level next week when we have interviews again. We're starting to study the vocabulary of farming concepts, so that's good.

I am getting more into the groove of training as it becomes less theoretical and more technical, and soon enough I will know my assignment. At that point, tech training will become a lot more useful, because it will be site-specific. In a way, I appreciated the theoretical training, because it really defined a paradigm from which Peace Corps works that you have to apply to every project you work on. Essentially, you are there as a facilitator of community development, you will not have a specific project assigned to you so it is your job to talk to the residents and figure out what problems exist that you can help with, and then it is your job to develop the capacity within the community to address the concern, and lastly, find ways to make the project sustainable after you leave. In that way, all Volunteers seem to do the same basic work, with slightly different technical knowledge to offer. It's entirely likely that I'll end up teaching English or nutrition charlas, despite being neither a TEFL nor a health Volunteer. It's all very lofty, but it seems important to get the approach to development down before you get thrown into a site. I laughed this week when I remembered talking to an SNRE grad student at Michigan who said, ''I thought about Peace Corps, but I'd want to do agroforestry and not environmental education. I can't imagine a worse assignment than environmental education,'' because really there's not a single PC assignment in which the Volunteer isn't an educator. No Volunteer gets to solitarily plant things in tree canopies for two years.

I'm trying not to mentally fuss over what kind of site I want, because it's really entirely out of my hands. I want to do protected area management ideally, but I'll have to work with whatever I get.

The Amish story made the afternoon news in Perú yesterday. Very surreal.

Yesterday was the first day of celebration for the anniversary of Neyda's school today, marked the Paseo de Antorchas, in which all the kids design something out of tissue paper, put it on a post, put a candle inside, and march around. I would like to have a word with whoever thought it was a great idea to combine small children, fire, and tissue paper into a single night of mayhem. The kids were cute, though, and there seemed to be minimal damage to life and limb, even when someone shot fireworks off a gigantic tissue paper caterpillar. One girl got to be the queen, and another, her maid. Peruvian girls love their hoop skirts, I tell you.