Site assignment; the unveiling of a mystery

This blog is already getting away from me.

Week ten?! Do you know what this means? This means my training is over. All that is left is final interviews and projects, many despedidas to the friends I’ve made in my training group, facilitators, language teachers, and host families, and the swearing in ceremony, the moment I finally become a volunteer.

Summer camp is over. The real stuff starts next week.

So, seeing as how I am this far along in the process, that means I’ve been very bad in keeping updated on what has brought us to this point. Site assignments, for one, and site visits to my new host family in my new town that I will be living in for the next two years. Let's start slow though, first with getting my site assignment.

Site assignment day was like a prolonged ulcer. They waited until a Wednesday to tell us our sites, and they waited until after lunch. Needless to say, many people had a hard time eating, but we had a big feast at our training center with both the business and youth volunteers, along with everyone from the Lima office. And, my host mom and host aunt prepared all the food!

My host mom and host aunt cookin' up a feast.

Anticucho, papas, y ensalada cebolla.

Zack, Sue, and Brittany try to weasel information out of Luis

When it came time to learn our site assignments, they of course couldn’t just let us know without ceremony. Our first assignment: find our language instructor. After searching the training center grounds high and low, I spotted her hiding under a tree behind some brush. She then gave each of us in our language class a cardboard piece of pizza, and we were instructed to find other people with the same kind of pizza. As you can imagine, the training center was filled with shouts, people running around and calling out, “Pepperoni! Pepperoni!” or “Cheese? Cheese?” My pizza was an “everything” pizza, and soon I found four others with the same kind, one my friend Zach from my language class (and my neighbor here in Buenos Aires) and the other three business volunteers. We looked at eachother, still not sure where we were going but wondering, “So, is this us? Is this our group going to the same region?” Because not only are we going to the same region, we are going to the same regional meetings once a month, we’ll have the same regional capital, and we’ll essentially be seeing more of each other than we will anyone else in our entire group for the next two-years. So while we were hurried to figure out the next step (a cryptic message on the back of the pizza pieces that needed decoding) we also took a moment to look at eachother and take in the faces of our people for the next two years. After decoding the message, learning we had to find a certain staff member for the next clue, and then tackling him to the ground (after a good chase, of course) we got the next cryptic message, this time a little easier to de-code. It didn’t take long for me to descramble the word puzzle, the letters only helped spell one region in Peru:

Lambayeque.

My Regional Coordinator with a map of Lambayeque.

So, that was it. We were going to Lambayeque. Tents were set out all over the training center grounds, and each region had a station already set up with a Regional Coordinator at each place holding a map with our names on it. (There are twenty-four regions in Peru, but Peace Corps only sends volunteers to nine.) Our coordinator handed us a folder with our names on it and inside it had everything-- the name of our town*, the population, the names of our host family—everything.

I have spent so much of my time in the Peace Corps in the dark, blanketed with ambiguity. First I had no idea where in the world I would be sent, when, or what I would be doing, or if I would even be accepted. Then I had no idea what country I would be sent to. Then if that wasn’t enough, when I got to the country I had no idea what town or region I would be sent to. And then suddenly, in one folder, were the answers. I was in complete shock.

I had just gone from weeks of anxiety and pondering, five-minutes of running around in circles searching for cheesy puzzle pieces (pun intended), to sitting in a chair with it all laid out in front of me. Facilitators came up and patted me on the back, gave me congratulations, and asked how I felt. To be honest, I felt like crying.

It was an overwhelming moment, the denouement of our training as Peru 17. Not only that, but this moment was over a year in the making since I first applied for the Peace Corps in July of 2010. There were times when I felt it would never come. And in truth, Lambayeque was probably the region I knew the least about of all the regions Peace Corps sends volunteers to. I looked around and many of my friends sat in their individual sections for the regions they would soon be heading to, which are on the opposite end of Peru. I may not see many of these people for another year until our mid-service training.

I looked through my folder over and over again, trying to absorb what I realized were superficial details about the place I would soon call “home”. I would be living in a town of 4,000, forty-minutes from the regional capital, forty-minutes from my friend Zack, thirty-minutes from the beach. I knew my host family’s names and ages, but were the nice? I knew my town had electricity and running water, but was it accessible to everybody? Here lay all the answers, but at the same time, the answers were still trivial. The blanket of ambiguity was only slightly lifted.

The Cajamarca group talking to their RC

I looked over at my compañeros each holding their own folder and noticed they had more information in theirs than mine. They had pictures, pages of writing, maps; I only had two sheets of paper with names, phone numbers, general town information.

“Why don’t I have that?” I asked.

“Because you will be the first volunteer to ever live at that site,” my friend Zack said.

Everyone else had detailed writing and maps because other volunteers had lived there and wrote them. I was entering new Peace Corps territory. I would be laying down the foundation for future volunteers. This means two things: 1) I won’t have to spend my time being compared to volunteers of the past (ie, “Kristin always made us cookies,” or “Jake had a science program that everyone loved.”); 2) I will have to lay the groundwork for what the Peace Corps actually is. Many first volunteers spend the majority of their time just getting people to understand who they are and why they are there. All sites have to request a volunteer in order to get one, but that doesn’t mean the entire town knows or understands why some gringo is living there and keeps wanting to do projects and hang out.

I had originally requested a site where I would be replacing a former volunteer, so I was surprised to find out my “newcomer” status. But after reflecting on it and talking with trainers I realized it was better this way. I came into the Peace Corps wanting a challenge, and while day-to-day life here is a challenge, I shouldn’t shy away from having a little extra work. I will just have to be extra-outgoing, extra-inquisitive, and be prepared for some extra-awkward situations. And while I may not do things perfectly, I’ll work with what I have and the next volunteer will have more opportunities to build even better programs and work with even more people. And maybe they’ll even spend some of their time being compared to me. 

Peru 17

*Due to Peace Corps safety and security regulations on blogs, I’m not allowed to say my exact location in Peru. However, I can’t promise I won’t slip up and say it on here sometime in the next two years.