Commitment to Serve

Before we could swear in as Peace Corps Volunteers, each one of us had to share our commitment to service with our fellow trainees. This is what my good friend Hestia shared and I loved it so much I want to share it on my blog 🙂

´Estia in Guate

For our last training assignment, we were asked to present our “commitment to serve.” This is what I read to my group of trainees: 

Primerosa:

 Yesterday Lindsay told me that I’m always smiling on the camionetta. And it’s true.

 I struggled with writing this commitment to serve because I tried to encapsulate all of my Guatemalan experiences and thoughts in a single poem.

But the reality is that to me Guatemala is composed of the tiny moments and experiences of everyday, as cheesy as it sounds. For me, one of these moments is found on the camionetta. The other is found in choco bannanos- but that’s a whole other commitment to serve.

 

Every Tuesday at 6:40am, when I’m barely awake, I stumble outside, a little bit grumpy, to wait for the camionetta in the cold. It’s when I see the bright red Primerosa drive up to our plaza…

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Arriving to My New Site

After saying goodbye to my host family that I have been living with for the last 9 weeks and all of my fellow volunteers, I made the long journey (an hour and a half) to my new site in Chimaltenango. I was one of the lucky volunteers because my counterpart had a car meaning I didn’t have to lug all of my stuff in a micro or a taxi. It is actually quite amazing how much stuff I accumulated in just over two months!

I arrived in site at around 1:30pm on Tuesday and proceeded to drop my luggage in my room before quickly eating a sandwich and heading to the Centro de Salud where I will be working for the next two years. At the health center, my counterpart introduced me to over 20 people, of which I remember two names, and proceeded to give them all a lecture on how they should make sure to help out the foreigner. It felt really nice to have someone who I met literally 48 hours previously take such an interest in my well-being.

From the health center I met up with my site mate who is in the Healthy Schools program and has been living in here for four months. I helped her with some logistics for the Health Fair she helped plan that would be starting the next day. I finally got back to my host family’s house at 6pm and was greeted with an invitation to leave in a half hour to go to my host moms mom’s house (we will call her host grandmother for short). On a side note- my host mom is only 27 so I am not sure if I should even be calling her my host mom at all. I didn’t actually end up getting home until around 9pm to unpack all of my stuff and get ready for the next day (health fair at 7:30am).

Although my first day was chaotic, everyone I have met here so far has been absolutely amazing and welcoming. I can really see this place becoming my new home in the next two years!

The Catholic church and town center