A Day in the Life of an El Savlador/Peace Corps Trainee

Up until now I haven't really reflected on what exactly we do here to fill our days. I'll start with this: our days are chock-full of stuff.

I never thought that I'd be one of those "early to bed, early to rise" type of people, but apparently that's who I've become in these last two weeks. Our day usually starts around 5:45am-6:00am. We take our pila baths and are at the breakfast table at about 7am each morning. Then we either have Spanish class in our community or we travel to San Vicente for technical training at the training centre. Each community has about 3-4 volunteers, ours has four, and one of the houses is designated at the place where Spanish class will be held -which is our house. Advanced Spanish speakers don't participate in the classes, but instead are urged to go out into the community to get a taste of what being a volunteer is actually like. That entails making contacts in the community by visiting certain institutions and getting to know more about their inner workings. I'd just like to mention that being a native speaker doesn't any more easy to march into an institution and ask to speak to the person in charge or chat to strangers on the street.

Technical training consists of charlas or presentations given either by Peace Corps staff or current volunteers on certain topics ranging from Salvadoran history to how to put together a lesson plan for teaching life skills. Having current volunteers come in and talk about their experience and their projects puts everything into perspective and takes the fear out of you a bit - well for me anyways.

We usually have an hour or so for lunch, during which we all line up for the microwave to heat up whatever lunches our host families have prepared for us and then comparing notes, and sometimes sharing or trading.

We've also been getting vaccinations to protect us from all of the life-threatning diseases we can get here such as, but not limited to: hepatitis A, Typhoid, Rabies, Tetanus and Diptheria. Once a week we also take malaria medication. They say you have really vivid dreams and everyone was really worried about the side effects - I'll be honest, the dreams are cool.

We end Spanish class or technical training between 4:30pm and 5:00pm then find our community buddies and bus it back to our pueblos American school bus style.

Dinner is at 6:30. We chat for half hour or so. We're in bed by 7:45pm - 8:00pm. Sleep and repeat.