Chris's Field-Based Training - Youth Development

Last Sunday we returned from a week out of the classroom and in the field where we got some real hands-on experience working with real people in real classrooms. This was a game changer, folks. Where the training had once been somewhat intangible and vague, skills and presentations began to take shape. Instead of hypotheticals, we were facilitating in a classroom with actual live Peruvian children. In a mere month, the staff here had transformed us from a bunch of wide-eyed foreigners into lean, mean presenting machines... IN SPANISH.

Telling you about this whole experience would end up being a short novel in and of itself, so instead I'll give you a short summary and a few highlights.

• The Youth Development group spent a week in the region of Junin, learning a small part of what it is to be a Peace Corps volunteer. Over the course of the week, we visited six sites, saw a small part of Peru outside of the craziness of Lima and its suburbs, and got a taste of the diversity of sites you can find within a couple hours' drive.
  

• As you may have intuited from what I've written so far, Angelica and the Community Health group spent the week elsewhere. Sad for us (especially since we "celebrated" our first wedding anniversary in different departments of Peru), but an experience I'm glad we were able to have. Angelica will be writing more about her experience at Field-Based Training shortly.

• More on that diversity of sites: some are well-developed and ready to roll, excited to work with a Peace Corps volunteer. Others are just as excited, but maybe lack some of the resources of other schools. Some are practically all boys where the teachers are trying the reign in a culture of machismo. Others are dominated by the young women, many wanting to be future engineers, taking the lead in the classroom. All of these sites are gorgeous, but some are tucked in a sunny valley, others on the high (14,000 ft!) plains, and still others built right next to a lake.

• Early in the week my brain started to short circuit and decided that it was reasonable to respond to people speaking to me in Spanish by speaking English with Spanish pronunciation. Please note, this does not work. By the end of the week I had managed to mostly rid myself of this strange habit.

• The months of June through August are winter in the Southern Hemisphere, but are known as the Andean Summer at high altitudes because it's typically clear and relatively moderate in terms of temperature. But let me tell you, it doesn't matter what season it is, anything above 10,000 ft is gonna be cold.

• Pachamanca is maybe my new favorite food in Peru (see the picture below). It works kind of like this: dig a hole, start a fire, heat some clean rocks, remove the rocks, throw in potatoes and meat (one kind, many kinds, whatever you have on hand) and corn and fava beans and cornbread wrapped in corn husks, bury it under the hot rocks, cover with a tarp and wait 30-45 minutes. Trust me, it's amazing.

• Life in the sierras of Peru is pretty darn magical. I'm looking forward to really beginning our adventure soon.