Down South: my Peace Corps adventures in Colombia: In-Country

Oh hay friends…I feel a little ridiculous posting this often but figured I’d throw up one more post while I still have constant internet and a little bit of time to kill…and just a few pictures as well. So as a heads up, this one got long--pictures are at the end so that’s a great place to scroll to get an abbreviated version of this post, FYI!

THURSDAY:
Our group of trainees arrived in Barranquilla around 7pm on Thursday night via Panama City after a ridiculously smooth set of flights. Our country director and a few other Peace Corps staff met us at the airport. We started off friendship with the country on the best foot possible when the director had immigrations open a whole new line for us so we could barge in front of the entire plane to get through customs…but no matter, moving right along!

We piled onto a chartered bus for a 45 minute trip on the carretera (like a beltway) around the city to our hotel. It was a little surreal as we sat on plastic deck-style chairs in a tiny air conditioned conference room to be welcomed as the first group to Colombia—especially having changed no time zones, nor really done much traveling, all things considered (a 3 hour flight from Miami, a couple hour layover in Panama, and then one more hour to get to Barranquilla from Panama City). Little did we know this horseshoe arrangement of plastic chairs would be our home base for the next few days, but after our welcome speech we lugged our baggage up the stairs, showered, and collapsed into bed until our 7am wake-up Friday morning.

FRIDAY:
Friday marked our first day of actual Peace Corps activities. The morning was filled with logistics, like getting blood taken for blood types needed for our Colombian IDs, filling out forms, getting multiple photos taken for visas, IDs, etc, and of course, the Spanish language interview. The interview was definitely the focal point of the day, more for some than for others…They’d divided us up into groups 1-4 (1 being beginner, 4 being “superior”) according to self-assessments we’d previously sent in. The 3’s and 4’s who weren’t native speakers took this remarkably seriously, carrying Spanish textbooks around them all morning catching up on their future conditional and all those verb tenses I don’t know the name of.

Having been labeled an ambitious “2,” I strode into the interview ready to be pummeled with incomprehensible questions. The interview was phrased as a “conversation,” during which one person asked questions while another sat behind us and took notes. It was a series of 18 questions that escalated in difficulty. Most questions I understood…at least part of…and then babbled incomprehensible, ridiculously incorrect Spanish. I’m not sure how my interviewer kept a straight face since as I talked my answers got even more wildly off the mark, but I did catch the one observing with a huge grin on her face when it was finally over…at least I may have provided them with amusement?! The good thing is we have four hours of intensive classes Monday-Saturday for the next three months, so in addition to living with host families, I’m thinking my language skills will thankfully improve quickly.

We finished off the night by visiting a local bar to have our first taste of the local beer—aguila—and catch some local music. My hotel roommate and I returned home to find Chance, the guy who does radio, setting up his in-hotel studio where he connived us into being a part of his first podcast. In Mary Poppins style, he unpacked huge studio microphones and arranged them professionally (he brought these microphones in addition to a high hat and snare drum!). If you feel like listening to a couple of tired trainees (including me) talking live about our first few days of our Peace Corps experience, you can catch it at peacecorpspodcast.com! (a domain he purchased for this very purpose)

SATURDAY:
Today, Saturday, we had our first session of language classes. Wow was it awesome. I’ve never had so much fun in a language class, from playing a huge variety of games, to group activities, to learning local dances (while playing other games). I thought that I would walk out of 3 hours of class with my head pounding, but instead the six of us mostly laughed our way through. With all that, we still definitely practiced our Spanish (although this class was meant mostly as an evaluation redux) and I understood a surprising amount. Then again, I can’t be too proud of my overall comprehension given that my group is labeled “novice” even though we are “2”s, and “1”s are considered novices as well…so it’s not like we were doing anything crazy in there…still, it was encouraging. They’ll be dividing us further into classes of 3, and then retesting us every 3 weeks and changing up classes and shuffling teachers as well, so this is going to be an extremely dynamic process.

The rest of the day we heard more presentations, including a little more about our positions and the Teaching English for Livelihood program. The schedule had to be adjusted a little because of the day’s arroyos, which are huge, localized flash floods caused sometimes daily throughout the city due to the torrential downpours and lack of a sewer system—some of our speakers were delayed because of them. I’ll do more on arroyos later, but they’ve been the most exciting/interesting part of our administrative presentations so far, if only for the dramatic pictures of streets turned into raging rivers, etc.

Our instructors/coordinators are comprised a variety of local staff and Peace Corps direct hires. Turns out that all the Peace Corps hires—from our country desk director to our language facilitator to the American co-program director, all ages of 40-60 some—are married to either other Peace Corps RPCVs or women from countries in which they served. They’ve all spent the majority of their adult life in Latin America as a consequence. The local staff have positions ranging from “project manager” to “administrative assistant,” and were responsible for finding host families, helping coordinate the program schedule, finding the schools we’ll teach in, being in charge of security, etc, and as opposed to the Americans, who can only take 5 year tours in each country in which they serve, are hired in permanent positions.

After our last hotel meal of meat, starch, starch, and some more starch, we gathered in a fellow trainees’ room to have a last Aguila and decompress. Tonight we’ll be packing and getting ready since tomorrow we have a few more hours of class and then we’re introduced to our host families! Not sure what my internet situation will be from here on out. (We’ve been budgeted the peso equivalent of $4.50 a day as “walkaround cash” while we train, which apparently includes the price of 2 hours of internet a week) Either way, my newest discovery is that my 3G kindle picks up internet all over Barranquilla for free, which means I can get my email whenever! Can’t really compose emails, but still it’s crazy to know that I won’t really be unconnected at all.

Anyway, tomorrow life gets real! No more internet, groups of English speaking friends, or hotel service…onward and upward to host families and Spanish immersion, and training for service!

PICTURES:

--these seem to have loaded in random order but since it took the last two hours for them to even upload and moving them seems to be too much for the internet connection right now, we'll just go with it...

Ginormous bottles of pop--for those times when 2.0 liters just isn't enough:

The room I'm sharing with Abby in Hotel Caribe--guess who got the little bed?!:

Outside view of Barranquilla's airport:

Speaking of things being bigger...it's hard to tell but these are almost twice the size of normal avocados. Yum.

The view outside the hotel during our first Colombian rainstorm (The arroyos of the day-- flash floods that turn the streets to raging rivers--occurred a few blocks from the hotel--didn't get a chance to see them though):