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):

Waiting in line for customs round one in Panama City:

Approach from the air to Barranquilla!:

Learning Colombian dances in our first ever Spanish lesson:

Outside our hotel, the Hotel Caribe: (it gets dark at 6pm every night all year long here since we're so close to the equator)

Our gate to Barranquilla!:

At the Miami airport at 5am in preparation for our 9:40 flight:

Staging

Welp, it happened—I’ve been orientated to the Peace Corps(!)

This afternoon, the 23 people in my group gathered in a small, frigid conference room in the Crown Royale Plaza hotel in Miami for five or so hours to become official Peace Corps Trainees (or PCTs, since turns out the Peace Corps is as acronym happy as one would expect of a governmental agency).

It was pretty much what you'd expect an orientation to be—beginning with a casual ice breaker, introductions, and then a review of the Peace Corps tenants, mission, our own aspirations and anxieties, policies, and our schedule for tomorrow. We had group breakout discussions, wrote on oversized pieces of paper, and even performed a skit! (Which was met with comforting skepticism from just about everyone in the room.) My personal favorite accoutrement, since it made me feel right at home, was our boldly named “Parking Lot,” poster (which, for any non-Epic/corporate readers, is the place where you put questions not currently applicable to the discussion to be answered later. Woohoo!)

Group mingling was exciting, since we have everyone from a 60-some year old ex-teacher to a radio personality. Teachers abound, with only 3 out of the 23 in the group coming straight out of college. After congratulating myself on preparing my “extremely” professional appearance (I wore a dress! Gasp!) I was startled to be surrounded by more than a few girls in pencil skirts and heels. Speaking of girls, I believe there are 18 girls to 5 guys…shocker!

With plenty of characters filling out the ranks, the general-mass divisors were language skills and belongings. On the luggage front, it was all about size; the light-luggage carriers were revered by most, though viewed by suspicion by the newly formed overweight-luggage- toters-clique. Weighing in at a cool 70 pounds (10 pounds under our limit) I stood firmly on average ground.

In terms of Spanish abilities, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself with plenty of non-bilingual friends. A few people know almost no Spanish, some classified themselves as having “survival” skills, and others were Spanish majors. Since from what I know the Peace Corps uses the Rassias Method, which I was exposed to in college and is a method which includes hours of language “drill” and often puts you on the spot (and therefore for me was more a lesson in shame than in French, my unfortunate undergrad language choice), I’m glad to know that I won’t necessarily be the lowest in my class!

That being said, it was unsurprising but still disconcerting to feel as though I may be at the lower end of the total-package skillsets—after my co-trainees asked “Do you speak Spanish?” to which my response is a solid “No,” the inevitable follow-up to this was, “So what’s your teaching background?” to which I also don’t have a great response. Every other person without Spanish skills had taught in classrooms anywhere from 1-30 years. So, although we are supposed to learn Spanish and teaching methods throughout the next 10 weeks prior to our placement, I’m hoping it won’t be too much of a struggle to keep up. Either way, one of the amazing things about the fact that our group has so much experience is that so many people in this group have had what we’re doing now as a lifelong goal.

We finished out the day with a group dinner at a seafood restaurant a block away and came back to our hotel rooms to prepare for our 4am wake-up. It is a sore point with most of us that for some reason, we must allow legitimately 5 hours to get from our hotel (literally a mile from the airport) onto our flight…but oh well…can’t really care, since the next time I post it will be from Colombia!

A Scholarly Tidbit

So, while I intend to include history only as appropriate in later posts, I’m pretty sure I’m not amiss in thinking that most people know Colombia only for its exports, potentially chiefly the illegal ones. I know that was the case for me! But since I’ve been doing a little reading about it, thought I’d share just a bit.

(I promise, this blog is not intended to be an integrated history lesson or highly scholarly in general, so if this doesn’t interest you, you should probably just skip this entry and come back later for the fun stuff :))

But in the meantime--

Like many South American countries, Colombia was invaded by the Spaniards in the 1500’s. The Caribbean coast, where I’ll be for both years, has played an important role as the intermediary between the Colombian interior and outside world. Although Bogota, which is located in the more populous, interior Andes region, is the largest city (and Colombia’s capital) with over 8 million people, Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Santa Marta are influential port cities on the Caribbean. Barranquilla, where the Peace Corps’ main offices are located and where we train, is a city of well over a million people. For some idea of geography, a map, courtesy of the State Department:

The country as a whole is unique in that it’s highly fragmented geographically and culturally. Its diversity has contributed to its historical lack of political and economic viability. With tropical lowlands to the west, a desert in the northeast, the Andes to the East and south, and jungle hindering transportation between (road transport between cities is still not safe or well-maintained), exports, politics, and general national revenue are not well coordinated. The people who live on the coast are known for their differentiated culture, including their food, manner of speech, and festivities, and are labeled costeñas; over two thirds of the country’s population lives in the mountains.

And yet, Colombia is far from being undeveloped. There’s a lot of legal wealth from industries—oil, natural gas, bananas, minerals, cut flowers, coffee, coal—and in the cities, almost all households have access to electricity and running water. (Internet is available in cafes all over, but not as much in individual houses). However, 45.5% of the country’s population is at the poverty level (where I’ll be, too, for the next two years…)

But, what about the kidnappings, you say?! The drug violence, the cartels? Well, that exists, but nothing like it did historically. The first half of the 20th century was marked by conflict between the conservative and liberal parties, and then after a government coup came “La Violencia,” from 1946 – 1957 where hundreds of thousands were killed. Peace was negotiated between parties and the “National Front” was established…during which time rebel groups fought, murdered, kidnapped, and were killed in return by the government. Drug wars, civilian deaths, and overall violence reigned, leading to massive citizen displacement.

(If you’re interested in names, these rebel groups include the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Democratic Alliance (M-19), and the National Liberation Army (ELN) These organizations are all still alive and kicking today, but have been fractured and no longer coordinate large scale attacks)

Then came President Uribe, who ran as an independent in 2002, and with the help of the US (to the tune of billions of US dollars), cracked down on the drug cartels and violence and negotiated peace during the span of his next two terms in office. (Like the US, the president has a 4 year term, limited to two terms) Since then, kidnappings, murder rates, and overall violence have decreased dramatically. Drug trade is still profitable--Colombia is estimated to produce 80% of the worlds’ supply of cocaine, and provides 90-95% of US supply--but much more contained. (Ironically, the output actually increased by 3% this last year even with all the money thrown at the crackdown effort—although land and labs are continuously confiscated, coca growers have apparently gotten more efficient at production.)

In terms of the kidnappings, murders, etc, most of the violence/kidnappings is now contained to rural areas. The State Department cryptically reports in its latest update in July of this year that “Kidnapping remains a serious threat, with two kidnapping cases of U.S. citizens reported since August 2010”—no mention of where, why or how—but it also says “Security in Colombia has improved significantly in recent years, including in tourist and business travel destinations like Cartagena and Bogota.” But like a typical overprotective parent, the US still “urges caution,” so in addition to getting permission from the US Embassy any time I want to travel in-country, I’ll also have to follow the policy all US government officials follow which is that I’m allowed to travel to major cities in the country but only by air, and I can’t use any public transportation at night.

That being said, official state department numbers estimate 60,000 or so US citizens are living in Colombia, with 70-80,000 visiting EVERY MONTH!! Which means, no excuses, friends. :)

Anyhoo. That seems comprehensive enough for now. And my next update will include real live experiences, woot!

An Explanation

After signing my name committing myself to 27 months of service in the Peace Corps, questions came fast and furious. People who know me best generally asked, "When do you leave?" followed with, “What will you be doing?” Others, especially those who have known me only in the anomalous context of a project manager, tended towards the more basic, “Are you crazy?”

To address the first two questions:

On October 13, 2011, I depart the US to head to Barranquilla, Colombia where I’ll spend 3 months training to be part of Colombia’s first official Peace Corps project in approximately 30 years (more on that later). After those 3 months, I’ll receive a placement in/around either Barranquilla, Santa Marta, or Cartagena, all port cities on the northwest Caribbean coast of Colombia (extremely safe and developed, far away from Colombia’s notorious mountains and their profitable exports!)

Wherever I end up, according to my “official” job description, I’ll be a part of Peace Corps’ TEFL program, or, Teaching English for Livelihoods. In other words, I will be teaching some level of English to some age of people, along with working with a local co-teacher to develop English curriculums. How will this play out in real life? This remains to be seen! I’ll do my best to describe that for you in some detail during the next two years or so.

As for the question, “am I crazy?”…well, I’m probably not an objective judge of that…but since I’m assuming that the question more begs a response detailing why I’d choose to leave a job where I made good money, worked with great people, and could honestly appreciate (if not always love) the work I did…well, no. I’m not.

Here are a few of my stock responses:

• I like teaching and will most likely be a teacher (in the US) someday…so as far as job descriptions go, this really does make sense
• I have never been fluent in another language, but now it’s do or die!
• I’ve always wanted to spend some time living in another country…and if not now, when?
• This is something I’ve wanted to do since I was little
• I majored in creative writing and want to pursue that as a career path…pretty sure I’ll get some good story ideas down there
• After losing my phone for the third time in a month, I decided to move to a place where that would no longer be an issue.


But really, I think this picture that my father sent me expresses the ultimate impetus I had for applying for and accepting this job:

So. Yes, of course I’m going to miss everyone and many things from my current life, and yes, of course I’m nervous on lots of different levels. However--for the first time in a long time, knowing that I’ll be heading to Colombia and spending the next two years in the Peace Corps has left me feeling like I’m exactly where I should be in life…so for now, I’m just going to run with that!