Ole

OK, so I made it through staging in DC, a thousand super excited volunteers meeting us at the airport, a night in Quito at a youth hostel with everyone dropping and sucking down bottles of water to help deal with the elevation, and out arrival and two solid days of meetings at a training center in Cayambe. Yesterday, our small group facilitator-spanish instructor took us to our host families for the duration of our training. Cayambe is beautiful, surrounded by green sloping mountains, and crowned by the a snow covered volcanoe. I´m in training with rural health volunteers who went off to more remote villages, but since I am in the Jovenes y Familias, we are city based. My host family is two parents with one six year old daughter and the parents are close to my age, so that will be nice I think. I felt pretty schlubby yesterday showing up in hiking boots and wrinkled pants, when my host ¨mother¨ was so elegant, and I was happy to unpack and have access to more of my luggage and clothes. I have what would not be considered a typical Peace Corps set-up, it´s a huge bedroom with a private bath and lots of light and space.

Today is the Ecuador-England game, and one of our Peace Corps tareas is to watch it with our family. Pfft. As if I would do anything else.

There´s lots more to say of course, how the arrival event, rather ominously named I think, felt sort of like this elaborate long term camp, how wierd it feels to be here now with all the little details of moving away from New York dogging me to the day before I left the country and now to be here, with limited email access and limited ability to do anything about anything that goes wrong, how good it feels to be here, living in South America, doing this thing that I have been wanting to do forever.

The other thing to mention is that my spanish sucks. It´s a great disappointment given the number of years I have devoted to learning it, but it has to be said. They did a little interview with us and places us in groups, and I was sort of miffed to have been placed in Intermedio Medio, which is exactly in the middle. But a couple hours with my host family verified for me that even though I might attempt a fancy pluscaimperfecto construction and pull it off from time to time, basic past tense conjugations still sometime confound me. Damn it all. I guess that is why I am here.

There are internet cafes here in town, so I´ll definitely get in to check on them every few days. Stay tuned for updates.