EARLY IN SERVICE TRAINING

I remember over and over again during my training in Lima when they would refer to early inservice training (EIST).  They would tell us after our first three months in site we would all be brought back to together to do our training and present our community diagnostics.  It felt like it was so far away when they kept talking about it.  But nope, it came so fast, and here I am after finishing up a week that started with the EIST and ended with the Field Based training.

So basically, the peace corps put all of us 32 health volunteers from Peru 16 back together again from all over the country in this really cute hotel in Huanchaco, La Libertad, a beautiful beach town for four days! La Libertad is two departments south of Piura.  It is about a 6 hour bus ride, as long as you take the right bus line, which was our first mistake.

So last Saturday, the other 3 Piura volunteers and I hopped on a bus a midnight to take us to our training.  We only paid 20 soles for the bus, which is really cheap.  However, it turned out to be a really crappy bus line, and even though we were scheduled to leave at midnight, we ended up not leaving until 2am.  Then the bus stopped a million times letting passengers off and on.  One time we even stopped to take care of a deflated.  So many hours later, frustrated, tired and hungry, we got to Trujillo (the capital of La Libertad).  We had signed up for a tour that day of the ruins and just made it in time to drop our stuff and go. Trujillo, unfortunately, is not a very safe town.  In the few minutes we had to walk over to a street vendor to buy a snack, a man bumped my friend Brittany and stole her wallet.  Later in the trip, one of the staff got her wallet stolen in the market as well. 

So that we spent the entire first day touring the ruins of Moche, which cover much of the area that Trujillo was built on.  There were some really interesting parts.  And in the middle we stopped at a tourist restaurant where my friends Brittany and BJ competed in a dance contest and won pisco sours.

At the end of the tour, we were dropped back off at our hotel in the beautiful beach town.  By this time many of the other volunteers were showing up, most of which we haven't seen in 3 months.  So there was a lot of catching up to do and it was really nice to compare in-site stories.  Later we were greeted by the Peace Corps staff and given a run down on what would be going on the first few days of the week.

So the training part was a little rough.  We'd sit in the conference room for ours on end listening to presentations and watching power points.  Which would be frustrating at times knowing that the beach was literally feet away, and we could see the beautiful hotel pool from where we were sitting.  It wasn't until almost the last day, after lunch we were all lounging around the pool waiting for our next session when the staff recognized that we needed a break and let us swim for an extra hour.  A group of us went running to the beach.  But when I jumped in the water and realized how rocky it was, I came back to the hotel and enjoyed the pool.  Later that night we went out wondering the town in search of dinner.  The town of Huanchaco is very touristy and full of adorable restaurants.  So it felt more like being in a cute beach town at home and I missed that.

So after the first 4 LONG days of training, we were broken into 4 smaller groups and sent all over the country to do our Field Based Training.  Which means we go to a second year volunteer's site and we do work in their site, as practice for what we could do in our own sites.  I was put in the group with BJ and 6 other volunteers from the Cajamarca group, which was nice to spend more time with them.  We stayed in La Libertad but drove about and our west to reach our destination of Simbal.  Simbal is a town of about 3500 people that is situated in a canyon surrounded by tall, dusty, dry mountains (or really hills).

So we stayed at what was kind of a creepy hotel.  It was big, and has the potential to be nice, but you could tell that no one ever stays there.  Our beds had no mattresses, only box springs.  And not only that, but the hotel owners were raising roosters.  And you know how much I love roosters, just imagine 20 of them doing their thing very early in the morning.  So between roosters and box springs, it was three nights of little to no sleep. 

The first day in Simbal, we went to the health post and built a garden. It was a little tough because the land is very very dry and rocky.  So we spent a lot of the day removing rocks, it was a long process and we were there all day, but the finished product looked really nice.  But after working in dust all day we were incredibly filthy.

The second day we went to a neighboring town and cooked lunch with a bunch of health promoters.  They killed a turkey for us, right in front of us.  And we provided fresh salad.  The purpose was to explain the benefits of a healthy meal.  And we proved this by having the fresh cut salad and explained that when you don´t boil those vegetables that hold more of their vitamins.  The people really seemed to like it.  We even made deviled eggs which was a huge deal!

Later that night we went over to another town and held an early childhood stimulation session and we made toys with the Mom´s and children.  They love when they get ¨stuff!  But the somewhere during all of this a few of us started feeling sick, and later into the night all of the 6 girls I was traveling with ended up with major stomach issues, so on our final day we were pretty miserable.  We listened to a session by the doctor about tuberculosis, and then after that we all packed our things and headed back to Trujillo. 

When we got back to Trujillo we had a few hours to kill until we were all leaving for our sites on buses.  We heard there was a pretty cool mall near by so we decided to go there.  This meant I got to spend some quality time in Starbucks, which was amazing, and later we went and saw a movie...in english and went to Pizza Hut afterwards...our last HOORAY before heading back to site. 

It was a real whirlwind of a week, and it was informative, but exhausting.  I was happy to get back to my site.