Sites!

Well I’m back again and this time with some exciting news. Yesterday in our afternoon session of Tech. training we were given the list of sites where all the Integrated Ed. Volunteers will be going! It is a list of 14 places that includes info about where the regional office is for each place, type of work we might do there, climate, indigenous languages spoken (if any) and types of communication available at each site. It would probably be better if I DID NOT list each site here just for security purposes of PC and the volunteers in my group but I can at least say where the regional offices are. There are three sites whose regional office is in Cochabamba, one in Sucre, three in Tarija and the rest are in Santa Cruz. So the most sites are outside of Santa Cruz- where it’s hot. One of the sites overlaps with Basic Sanitation work but the rest are focused on Integrated Ed. I.E. work includes things such as health, HIV/AIDS, computers, teacher training, working with youth, women’s groups, nutrition, libraries etc. We have interviews next week where we are going to be able to discuss which sites we are most interested in. PC does a good job of taking our opinions into account which I really do appreciate. I am interested in going to Tarija because it is one of the regions I do not know at all and it is also on the border with Argentina which could be nice for possible travel later on. That’s it for the sites.

I thought you might also be interested in knowing more about what we’ve been doing in training. Well we finished our gardening unit and that is my garden in the picture above. Willy and his brother Mauricio came to my house and helped construct this massive fence around it. I say massive because originally PC gave us the idea to use sticks and the tape from inside cassettes for a fence- it apparently keeps the chickens and other unwanted animals away. Anyways, since my house has all sorts of animals I thought a real fence might be better but I didn’t think they would actually pull it off! Now I can only hope that some of my food grows! I bought cow manure/compost from next door to enrich the soil before planting. I planted peas, radish, green beans, parsley, cilantro, beets, habas- really big beans similar to lima beans, and pumpkin. I don’t think everything will grow BUT some of it should so that will be really cool.

After the gardening unit we have been working on education, non-formal education, how to lead workshops and domestic violence. We split into groups and each group will be doing a computer workshop and self-esteem workshop. My computer group is doing an advanced session on how to type letters- formal and non-formal depending on the level of our students. In the self-esteem group we are going to be doing some exercises from some self-esteem books- PC resource. These workshops are being implemented as part of our Tech. Weekend this weekend. We are going to visit a volunteer at his site in Tiraque where we will be giving the workshops to children/youth. I will be back with more updates after the weekend to say how the workshops went! Still staying happy and healthy : )

Love,

Alana

P.S. My address during training and for the next couple of months is:

Alana Liskov
Cuerpo de Paz
Casilla 1603
Cochabamba, Bolivia
South America

Small packages may be sent here. If they are bigger I just have to go pick them up at the post office for a small fee.