Site Assignment!

Friday we were given out site assignments. I am beyond excited about my placement. My site is located in the province of Puntarenas, if you look up Golfito, I am in that area. Its right by the coast and by the Panamanian border. I will be taking the place of a Peace Corps volunteer from the CYF program (the program involves working with youth and families), so my counterpart is the director of the local school. The town is small, about 600, but it seems to have a lot of resources. Among programs I will be involved in are teaching ICT classes, helping to form a development association, helping with hydroponic systems (very cool), possible doing some summer camps for kids, and more. I am really happy about the location and nature of work and feel so lucky to have been assigned exactly what I wanted. I am very grateful. There´s a lot more to say about everything, but I am going to visit the site next weekend so I will update after that. On Thursday and Friday we have counterpart workshop where we meet out counterpart and begin working with them, then on Satuday we travel to our site for 5 days. It´s about 10 hours of traveling from San Jose to my new site. Oy!

So to celebrate site assignments, most of Tico 20 went to the beach this weekend. About 35 of us went to a beach town called Puerto Viejo. The weekend was perfect. We have beautiful weather, the ocean was amazing, and we all got to spend time together before heading out to our new sites. The town was very tranquilo. We stayed at a place called Rockin J´s, where one sleeping option is to rent hammocks. The day involved laying on the beach, playing in the ocean, listening to a live band, dancing, and spending quality time together. I am going to miss spending time with Tico 20.