Saturday, June 2, 2007

One month in...

Well, I´ve been here four weeks and a few days so far. Things have been going fairly well, with definitely some ups and downs. I just changed host families and my new family seems like they are going to be perfect for me. They are very caring & the mom loves to talk!! I am living closer to the training center now, too, which will be very convenient.
Over the past month, I have had the opportunity to visit 3 current volunteers in their site. 2 of them I just visited for a couple of hours, and then this past weekend I spend 3 days with a volunteer in Eastern Guatemala, we were only a couple of hours from El Salvador, actually. Very tropical in Eastern Guate, with lots of lucious fruit trees, accompanied by warmer weather and humidity, of course :) Can´t ever have the best of both worlds, you know :)
I really enjoyed having that hands-on perspective of a current working volunteer, he is actually about to finish his service in a little over a month.
That sure seems a long ways away for me....2 years, yikes!!
I have been having fairly regular Spanish classes with two other girls, and our classes are about to end b-c they have decided we speak at an advanced level & they need to put our teacher with some new learners.
We have also been doing technical training for small business, training to train, basically. Such as giving business classes to adult entrepreneurs, some 12 year old kids, too. The reason for teaching business to the youth is because here the majority of kids end their schooling in 6th grade. So, we teach them business fundamentals and encourage them to continue their education at the same time.
Our training group is going to Quetzaltenango in a couple of weeks to work with several classrooms at a school. Myself and one other girl are assigned to teach a classroom of 26 for 2 hours a day for 5 days a week. This gives us the opportunity to have hands on experience teaching the business fundamentals in the classroom setting. Although our primary job will be to work with adults, we often have the chance to pick up secondary projects. The classroom setting would be one possibility.
I have included a few photos in my blog, finally!!! Sorry it took me so long, computer access isn´t always convenient. Feel free to email. Would love to hear from everybody!!

No comments: