They say the Peace Corps is the toughest job you’ll ever love. I’m not yet on the job because I’m still in training, but I can definitely confirm the “tough” part. Four weeks into our 11-week Pre-Service Training schedule, I am just now beginning to adapt to the intense and unrelenting routine. Here’s what my typical week looks like in Colombia’s coastal region.
Monday/Wednesday/Friday
I wake up before 6 am to shower and get dressed. My host mom brings me coffee immediately, as she has learned that I am useless before caffeine. Within an hour, she typically serves me a breakfast of fresh fruit, hand-made arepas, and huevos pericos (eggs scrambled with tomatoes and onions). This comes with another cup of café con leche, which she makes on the stove, cowboy-style.
Language and Culture training begins at 8 am in one of the host homes of the five students in my Spanish class. Our Peace Corps-assigned professor, Gisela, speaks only in Spanish, in a thick and quick Costeño accent. She doesn’t focus much on grammar instruction; instead, she introduces new vocabulary and cultural content every day, which we practice by playing games and engaging in conversation based on prompts she gives us. Classes are immersive, engaging, and fast-moving. They are also utterly exhausting, and my irregular progress sometimes frustrates me to the point of tears. The intense heat and humidity add to the challenges, but it helps that I adore my teacher and classmates.
We break for lunch around noon and go to our respective host homes to eat, then return to class. Around 4 pm, we wrap up for the day and walk home through muddy or flooded streets, as the regular afternoon rain showers create arroyos that flow into the nearby Magdalena River, which runs along the edge of town. Upon arrival at home, I usually collapse on my bed for 30-40 minutes before showering. (Thanks to the extreme heat and humidity, I have become a huge fan of cold showers, which are the only kind available.) Between 6 pm and 7 pm, whenever I am ready to eat, my host mom serves me a delicious dinner consisting of a protein source (chicken, fish, or pork), a small salad dressed with a bit of vinegar, and a carbohydrate or two (rice, potatoes, or yuca). The family rarely eats together, as everyone has different schedules. After dinner I typically spend 2-3 hours doing homework and catching up with friends before climbing into bed beneath my trusty mosquito net and sleeping like a rock.
Tuesday/Thursday
I wake up before 5 am and have coffee and breakfast. At 7:15 am, six fellow trainees and I board a chartered bus outside our local ARA grocery store for the 1.5 hour ride to Barranquilla. Along the way, we stop to pick up 10 more trainees in a nearby town before gathering with all 30+ cohorts in a blessedly air-conditioned conference room. (Did I mention it is hot and humid here?) From 9 am to 4 pm, we participate in sessions covering personal safety and security, health and food safety, medical issues (including lots of vaccines), community integration, host family dynamics, diversity and inclusion, appreciative inquiry interviewing techniques, and technical training for our eventual work in the field, once we move to our permanent sites, which will be scattered throughout the Caribbean and Andean regions.
Afterwards, I return home on the bus, shower, have dinner with my family, do homework, and fall asleep between 10 pm and 11 pm.
Saturday/Sunday
Weekends are a bit more flexible, but still quite busy. This is when I do laundry, clean my room, finish any homework I couldn’t complete during the week, organize my upcoming week, and catch up with friends and family. Many of us are taking dance classes on Saturdays and Sundays so that we can perform a choreographed number during our swearing-in ceremony, which will take place in mid-November.
Beyond this, the Peace Corps sometimes plans excursions to other communities where volunteers are currently posted. A recent ½ day trip to Usiacurí required three buses each way and ended up taking a full day by the time we returned to our communities. Weekends are also the time to go to nightclubs to practice our newly-acquired dance skills, or to meet up with our cohorts in other communities for mingling and bonding.
This past week, several of us had a second round of Language Proficiency Interviews to determine how much progress we are making in our language classes. We will get our results next week, along with personalized recommendations about what we need to work on to reach the required skill level to begin our two-year assignments in our permanent host communities. There, we will likely be the only Peace Corps volunteer – and the only foreigner – in the town. If we are lucky, one other volunteer will also be posted at the same site, as some communities will receive both an Educational sector volunteer and a Community Economic Development volunteer.
My work will be in the Community Economic Development sector, which entails working with women and high school students to instill livelihood and financial literacy skills, as well as supporting entrepreneurs who want to grow their own businesses. Educational volunteers work with local English teachers to help them teach English better.
Because I am not yet on the job, I can’t yet confirm whether I will love it. But so far, despite the grueling schedule and demanding expectations, I am loving Colombians and their culture, my host family and peers, our teachers and Peace Corps staff. I’m also enjoying learning to dance Salsa and Bachata, and am handling the heat and humidity much better than expected. Like most of my peers, I am struggling with the jam-packed schedule and fire hose delivery of content. Our shared coping strategy is to focus on what is expected of us in the moment, rather than worrying about what’s next. Our group motto is, “That is a problem for future me.”
Please note: Any opinions or views expressed in this blog post are mine and mine alone. They do not represent the views of the Peace Corps.