Daily Life as a Trainee

As a trainee, your life for 10 weeks is pretty much laid out for you hour by hour… so here is what I do on a day-to-day basis.

Training is located in Guarambaré half of the time, and in my community of Nueva Esperanza the other half. Usually, we have 4 hours of language class in the morning (with breaks, thankfully). Then we have a break for lunch. In Guarambaré, we eat at the training center with a lunch that our host family packed for us. When in our communities, we go home for lunch to eat with the fam. The afternoons are filled with talks about security, medical safety, and technical training (depending on the day). Training is from roughly 7:30-5 M-F, and then just until lunch on Saturdays. Sundays we get the day off.

In Nueva Esperanza, just about every day after training a group of volunteers play volleyball in the neighborhood. Sometimes we play with a host brother and his friends of one of the trainees, while other times it’s just us Americans. I am finding that it is a great way to decompress and relax, and really enjoy it. When I’m not playing volley, I am relaxing in the front of the house with my host mom - people watching and drinking tereré.

Thankfully, training is not just in a classroom. There is the Peace Corps Volunteer visit, where we get to see what it is like to live as a rural health and sanitation volunteer. Then there is Long Field Practice (next week!), where we travel with our language class to get some hands on experience in the field. And finally, we have our future site visit, where we spend a few days in the community that we are going to spend the next 2 years. There are also some excursions and what not, which help to break up the classroom routine.

Some of the fun technical type training I have learned so far include: how to make a planter for veggies out of newspaper, how to build a trash pit and build a fence for it, how to dry fruit/veggies/etc for storage in the off season, and how to dig a veggie garden, and how to build a fogon. I have found everything we learned in tech training so far very practical and fun, and I look forward to hopefully being able to incorporate them into my site.