Training

I guess I should go ahead and talk about training—partly so that future Ecuador TEFL trainees can have a good idea of what they're in for and partly so that people back home can see why I don't whatsapp them every damn day, mother.

Training generally takes place from 8am to 5pm at the Peace Corps training center in Monteserrin, which is a compound that the Peace Corps rents in a somewhat bougie neighborhood of Quito. I say "compound" because it appears to be a large house where many of the rooms were converted to offices and additional bathrooms were built as outdoor attachments. It is also completely walled/gated-in (as most properties of any significance in Quito are) and comes with private security. The soon-to-be-former president of Ecuador lives nearby. We take a bus from the community of Nayón, where we all live with our host families (or almost all–some people live in San Pedro, which is a ways down the valley from Nayón), and we walk up a series of steep hills every morning to get to the training center.

The topics covered in training mainly consist of Language & Culture, Safety & Security, Medical, Peace Corps objectives, and, of course, TEFL. You can swap out the TEFL portions with whatever your sector is (Youth & Families or Community Health), but all the other information they throw at you pretty much stays the same. Sometimes, current volunteers come to lead sessions on various topics, and sometimes we have guest lecturers on things like history, culture, and the law in Ecuador. We get to take some trips during training. We go on a coast cultural trip to see a different landscape and climate than the one we are exposed to in Quito, which is in the Sierra; a PCV visit to shadow current Peace Corps TEFL volunteers at their site and their job; another cultural trip to indigenous and/or Afro-Ecuadorian communities so that we can learn about marginalized communities; and a site visit, where, for the first time, you visit the community you will be assigned to live and work in for the next two years. The site visit is also sort of an inspection of your host family, workplace, and community. The Program Managers don't have time to visit every site, so if you arrive and conditions do not adhere to Peace Corps policies, or your host family has a dog and you're allergic to dogs, or your counterpart or the community are hostile to you, it is important to let your Program Manager(s) know so that they can place you in an environment where it will be possible for you to be successful.

Another thing we do during training is potlucks. Everybody is expected to bring something, though if you're not much of a cook, your contribution could be chips or soda. If you do like to cook, it might be a good idea to bring hard-to-find ingredients to make a specific dish. This is advice that I wish I would have paid attention to while packing. Yes, they told us it might be a good idea to bring ingredients if we wish to cook a dish for our host family, but they neglected to mention that there would be multiple opportunities to demonstrate our cooking skills for our entire omnibus and training staff. As I was feeling quite far from home and quite proud of southern food, I decided to make shrimp & grits. However, as you might have guessed, grits do not exist in Ecuador. Still, I was determined to make my shrimp & grits, so I tried my best with the ingredients I could find. I had to hand-grind dried corn (I used morocho) in a molino borrowed from Abuelita, and by the time my "grits" were cooked, they were closer to polenta in texture. Loaded down with butter and cheese, they tasted okay, and seeing everyone's reactions to my efforts was great. They ranged from Northerners who pondered curiously at this thing they had only ever heard of, to fellow Southerners who thanked me for bringing a little taste of home, to Ecuadorians who eyed this substance with skepticism and didn't quite get that the shrimp goes on top of the grits.

Training can often feel like study abroad. You're in a controlled environment, surrounded by your American peers, and overloaded with assignments when all you want to do is explore your new city/country. But for Peace Corps trainees, the adventure doesn't end after three months; that's when it really begins.

Welcome!

I think I may have finally figured out how to open my door, and it only took me one month and two door handles to do it.

Ok, I'll explain that later on. First, let me start by apologizing to all of the friends, neighbors, relatives, former co-workers, and interested parties back home whom I had promised to keep updated via blog. I've been in Ecuador for over a month, and I'm just now getting around to it. You see, the first thing you have to do when writing a blog is decide on a title for your blog. I spent about three weeks ruminating on the title of my blog, only to discover that every cheeky or clever title I could come up with had already been taken. I spent another two days settling on a rather banal name for my blog and the rest of the week thinking about what I should write about as my first entry. Or, at least, that is what I did when I wasn't busy living my life.

Speaking of my [new] life, let me give you all a rundown of what my days have consisted of since I left North Carolina. The first part of being in the Peace Corps is Staging. Staging for us took place at a hotel in Miami. For two days we sat in a conference room while a couple of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCVs, from this point forward) from intentionally-not-our-host-country walked us through a sort of Peace Corps 101. I think that Staging more-or-less serves as a sort of lining-up point. To me, it seemed like a way to remind everyone of what exactly it is that they have signed up for before they actually get to their country of service and are thrown into it head-first. We were bombarded with activities and presentations about the Peace Corps mission and what it's like trying to adapt to a new culture. By the way, when I say "we" I mean my omnibus. An omnibus (omni, for short) is a group of trainees who all arrive in-country at the same time and go through training together. Each omnibus has been given a number, presumably starting with the first group of volunteers that arrived in Ecuador in 1962; mine is 117.

On the third day, we re-packed our bags and boarded our flight to Quito. We arrived around 8 pm (we're on Eastern Standard Time here, same as back home) and were greeted by Peace Corps staff and taken to a hostel close to Peace Corps headquarters, where we would spend the next two days. That night, I learned the most important, non-obvious piece of information anyone who comes to Ecuador needs to know: You can't flush toilet paper down the toilet. Maybe I'll explain it in more detail in another post later on, but for now all you need to know is that in Ecuador, there is always a trash can by the toilet and toilet paper always goes in the trash can.The first days of training were filled with a mix of medical tasks, legal paperwork, and cultural adjustment activities. On that Friday afternoon, we finally met our host families and got to go home to the suburb of Nayón for the first time. My host family consists of: a mother, a father, two sisters, a brother, a brother-in-law, a nephew, and two nieces. I adore them all. I love the fact that I always have a family member who is ready to take me somewhere, show me something, or even just sit and talk to me. I have also met many members of my extended Ecuadorian family. The most important is La Abuelita, but there are countless aunts, uncles, and cousins (and children of cousins and cousins of parents and various other relations, all of which are easier to explain as tíos/tías and primos). Some of these extended family members have Peace Corps host children of their own, which is particularly great because when I get invited to (i.e. dragged along to) family events, I am guaranteed to not be the only gringa there. It also just feels good to have other people in the community who already know who I am and are looking out for me.

Speaking of host families, this seems like a pretty good point at which to bring back up the story of the door. Anyone who has traveled to a foreign country knows that most doors around the world do not lock the same way as American doors. Each place seems to have its own set of scientific principles when it comes to locking mechanisms. The front door of my house requires a very, VERY specific pattern of twists, pulls, and pushes in order to be opened. My success rate during the first two weeks living in the house was about 50 percent, meaning that I could get the door open about half the time, still not having any idea what the trick was or how I had managed to do it, and the other half of the time I struggled to no avail and had to call somebody to come and open the door for me. I could not fathom how all the inhabitants of this house could open the door with such [relative] ease, and I couldn't repeat their movements either. One day, I was putting a lot of effort into the pull phase and the door handle (which at the time was being held together with some sort of sticky putty) snapped right off the door! Two days later, a new handle was put on the door, and that was when my problems really began. My success rate dropped to zero. It seemed that this new door handle had somehow altered the alignment of the chambers, and now I couldn't even get the key to twist in the lock, let alone get the door open. I was confounded at how my family members, whom I now had to call every time I needed to enter the house, were unaffected in their door-opening abilities. I thought that for sure I would be chained to my family members' schedules for the next seven weeks, but all of that changed when my brother-in-law explained the process to me in a way that 1) made sense and 2) was factually correct. After the first twist of the key, the next twist-and-hold requires a quick pull and push of the door for it to open. The important element is not the amount of pressure applied, as I had assumed, but the speed at which it was done. I have successfully opened the door three times on my own now, but this, my friends, is why I was not an engineering major.