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Published: March 16th 2010
Pesillo
My little brother Kevin drew this for me.February 26th. There is a pig outside my door right now grunting. It's night time and I'm finally by myself, my first day that I've really felt like I'm in the PC. My family here is awesome. I'm already in love with them. It takes me a while to break the ice but once I get rolling, there is no stopping me. You know what got me started. I drew a picture of my family trees (see photo) and showed it and explained it to them. They loved it. Then I asked about their family and drew a family tree with them. I feel like drawing is going to be an integral part of my learning experience here in Pasillo.
I'm in no means perfect yet. I made a couple of mistakes. I think at one point I may have told mi mama that I have kids back in the US. Oops. It's a learning process. I have a mama, a papa, and four brothers, but only three live in Pesillo. My brother's are Wilmer (22), Alex (14), and Kevin (10). They are my lifeline, especially Alex and Kevin. They love to act out words for me and we occasionally
PACA tool
24 Hour Clock have dance sessions in the tienda.
Class is crazy. Monday thru Friday I wake at 6:30 am, eat by 7, and start school at 8. I don't leave until 5 sometimes 6 pm in the afternoon. It doesn't give me too much time with the family let alone time to organizer my thoughts. But I guess I shouldn't complain about that because as soon as I finish training, I'm going to have more time then I'll know what to do with. Our town consists of three streets that run parallel to each other. Besides me there are five other volunteers living in my town. Julie, Becky, Bryan (another engineer), and Santiago and Kayla. Santi and Kayla are married and although Santi lives in our town he actually doesn't take class with us. As it turns out I'm in Spanish 1, (Or Spanish Cero as we like to call it) with Kayla and the rest, and Santi is originally Ecuadorian for the first ten years of his life and therefore speaks fluent Spanish. So he has to walk 30 minutes each morning to get to his class the next town over. The people in my class are wonderful and I
PACA tool
Seasonal Calendar think what we lack in actual Spanish skills we make up for in pizazz.
In class we are working on our PACA tools this week. PACA stands for Participatory Analysis for Community Action. It is a set of tools that we use to gather information and statistics about our town. We do this by interviewing people, mostly our host families, about their daily lives. We are required to complete a set of PACA tools for our actual sites so this is more like our trial run. The tools consist of:
1. A map of the town
2. A 24 hour clock of the daily life of a man, woman, and child in our town.
3. A full annual calendar with things such as the growing seasons, the rainy seasons, and holidays.
4. Lastly, we had the choice of doing a resource availability chart, a needs assessment matrix, or a gender matrix. Seeing as we don't speak Spanish well we decided to do the gender matrix because it involved the least amount of interviewing compared to the other two. In the gender matrix (for out trial run) we choose a problem within the community, introduce a solution, and then
determine who the solution benefits the most. We decided to focus on the fact that there wasn't a colegio (similar to a high school), and looked at who it impacted.
The PACA tools are really interesting to test out and we were actually able to present our results to the rest of the 55 Peace Corps volunteers. And our group won first place for best presentation!!! We won a box of chocolates and a big boost of confidence. Sometimes I get frustrated and annoyed with my lack of Spanish skills, but it's moments like that that remind me that there is more to being a Peace Corps volunteer than just language skills.
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