First Days

I moved to Comte Sunday May 23rd. My host brother picked me up from the bus stop and during the dark, rainy ride to the house I kept thinking, wow. Here I am.

These past few days have been a bit of a reality check. I´m realizing that I´m here for 2 years, it´s going to be hard, but it´s going to be great. I can´t describe how welcome I feel in the town, and it´s only my first week. The few days that I´ve gone to the grade school the kids love to yell my name (those that don´t remember my name endearingly refer to me as ¨the new Katherine¨) and give me hugs. Walking up and down the street, everyone says hi to each other. It is something about the town that I already appreciate. There´s another family in town that is super kind and have already designated a rocking-chair on their porch to be ¨my chair.¨ Each time I´ve passed their house they´ve waved me down to sit, drink fresco and talk. They´re on my walk to the high school, so I feel that I´ll be spending a bit of time at their house.

The first 3 months here I plan to get to know everyone, better my Spanish, and complete the CAT. The CAT, which stands for Community Assessment Tool, is something that every volunteer has to complete in there first 3 months. It´s basically what it sounds like, an analysis of the community with details such as history, population statistics, education, crime, needs, opportunities, etc etc. From that, we should be able to see potential projects.

In the meantime, I´m going to start on some small things that I know I´ll be doing in the future. The volunteer before me taught English classes at the grade school and HS. Since there are already English teachers at both schools, I felt that it would be better for me to work with the English teachers to help them with pronunciation, fluency, etc. The teachers are really happy about this, and therefore so am I. I also someone became a pseud0-leader of a women´s exercise group. They asked me if I was interested, and of course I said yes, and today found myself leading everyone in stretches before going on a run. Aftwards they had a Zumba tape that they wanted to do. If you have seen this before, picture me and a room full of 40 year old women rockin out to Zumba exercises. It was a lot of fun.

Pura Vida!