So I am finally a real volunteer! That’s right this guy made it through the three month training period and is now a real volunteer (incidentally those three months do now count towards my 2 years here, so as I write this 2 weeks into my service I still have 23.5 months left to go). As I mentioned in an earlier post, the training period in the Peace Corps really does feel like your back in middle school, so I’m super happy to have graduated and made it to out into the grown up world again. Though these elated feeling at graduating are also tempered with sadness at missing my fellow H17 (Honduras PC group # 17) volunteers, who are now spread out all across the country. It is actually remarkably similar to the feelings I experienced five months ago upon graduating college (except it is accompanied with far less partying). Seeing as a lot has happened in the months since I last put up a blog entry (my bad) I figure I should fill those of you who are still interested in my life (mom) in on what has been going on.
The graduation its self was really nice. It was held in the US embassy and we all got dressed up in our nicest cloths and there was a reception on the lawn, attended by us new volunteers, our trainers, and our host country counterparts who had come in to bring us to our site, and who we had met that morning for the first time. We got to hear inspirational speeches from all of the PC brass and head trainers, as well as two of our own new volunteers, and US ambassador to Honduras Hugo LLorens. Overall I was most impressed with the speeches by our volunteers, one of whom came into the program with no Spanish what so ever but was able to pass his language exam and give a very understandable speech in his new language, the other of whom is a native speaker and gave a beautiful speech including a moving poem. The other highlight of the afternoon was hearing 57 American PCVs trying to sing the Honduran national anthem (which is actually really hard to sing as it changes rhythm and tempo like 5 times, so not just those of us who are brutally musically challenged had problems).
After the ceremony I got a picture with Hugo LLorens, which as an international relations major I thought was pretty cool (and I am saying here so that you will all know who that guy with me in the picture is, since ambassadors don’t really have much celebrity recognition status). Once we had all taken pictures and said goodbye to our awesome training staff we all climbed back on the school bus that had taken us there and went to a restaurant in Valle de Angeles (the big town closest to our host family homes). There we partied the night away, as much as people with a 9 pm curfew can, then went home to try and get some sleep in before we met up with our respective counterparts to be taken to our new sites in the morning. For me, this meant waking up at 4 am to be ready for my 4:30 pick up since I was headed out to Ocotepeque, the smallest department (the Honduran equivalent of a state) about ten hours away from Tegucigalpa. Though I had found out the day before that I was actually quite lucky since my counterpart and the others from my department had rented a mini-bus to take me and my fellow volunteers back. This was huge, because most of us had a lot of luggage because we had to pack stuff for two years of service, and the thought of having to lug it all around between the multiple busses we would have had to take otherwise was not a happy one.
After some confusion on the part of my counterpart in finding the tiny dirt road (off the bigger dirt road) on which I lived, we were finally able to reunite. I then realized that the “mini-bus” we were taking, with 14 people and all of the volunteers’ baggage, was actually a normal sized van. This meant that by the time we went to pick up the last three volunteers it was quite clear that there was no way we were going to be able to all fit with the luggage (despite this we tried to tetris things for a while including strapping things to the roof Beverly Hillbillies style before we finally accepted this fact.) In the end we decided that some of us would go in the van with the luggage and drop it off at the other’s sites, while the rest would take a bus. I was originally in the group to take the bus, but as the van was going to pull away my counterpart (who is the vice mayor of my town, and an exceedingly quite and shy man) made an awesome power move and hopped into one of the remaining two seats and motioned for me to follow. We then drove off before there could be any further discussion of who should actually get these seats (this is what we at 4 Farrington would call straight kinging it), and thus I avoided taking a series of public transport busses to my site. Though some of the elation at this fact wore off as a realized that the seat I was in was a fold down jump seat which mostly consisted in two hard metal bars jabbing me in the back for ten hours. This fact aside it was super excited to be headed to my new site.
