Down to SIx Trainees & Our Future Site Visit: Warning Long Post!

A few weeks back we lost one of our fellow trainees.  We aren't sure what really happened-why she decided to early terminate. She was the only other woman in the group and also the other trainee assigned to Guanajuato, so now Antoine and I will be the only "pioneers" going as the first volunteers to the new center there.  I think she was struggling with the language and I also think she had not pictured her Peace Corps experience being the kind of unique experience the technology transfer program here is in Mexico.  It is a fairly technical, professional program, although many people in our program who are seeking the more "typical" PC experience find that in their secondary projects working with children in the pueblos or building houses with Habitat for Humanity programs that some people work with here.  In any case, we wish her the best.  I am sure it was not an easy decision to early terminate after the long process of applying to Peace Corps.

We also had a chance to visit our new center and future home city of Guanajuato, and also to meet our new host "mom"!  Unfortunately, the town is just as hilly as I feared! the picture above is a picture of the monument to El Pípila.  He was a miner and hero during the Mexican Independence.


The bigger issue is that it is really mostly a tourist city and a very youthful university city, so staying in the center can be really noisy. And of course then there are the famous "callejones", the little narrow streets only accessible by foot or steep staircases.  So the topology may make it very hard for us to find a place to live that is relatively accessible and not too far from shopping and the bus we need to go up to the centro.  So fingers crossed that we will find something we like. 

Up at our center we met one the employees that we will be working with whose family is a very old family from Guanajuato and she has promised to help us house hunt, so that would be terrific!  And in addition, she lived 8 years in Ashland Oregon, which is the sister city of Guanajuato, so she we have some northwest memories in common.  She actually took us to her family's home while we were there.  She is the oldest of 7 girls and 1 boy in the family, so her mom's house was a beehive of visiting family. We met Suzy's 1 year old niece, who was adorable and who was wearing this cute little crash helmet they had bought her since she is just beginning to walk.  Her neighborhood is one that we are targeting.  It is about 10 minutes from the center.  We would have to take 2 buses to the center where we will work but it would be worth it to be able to live in a little quieter part of the city.  We will see how things develop.  We have been told that it is harder to find housing in Guanajuato than in Querétaro since it is really much smaller-probably only 70-100,000 people versus a million, and then you have all the limitations caused by the hills-there just isn’t enough room in the valley to build anything else.  So will just have to wait and see. 

We won’t be facing looking for a place right away, anyway, because we will be staying with another host family for the first month.  We met our new host “mom”, Rosie on our future site visit as well. She seems great.  She is a single mom with three sons, although the two oldest ones are living and studying in Querétaro.  So she lives with her youngest son who is finishing high school.  They live up the hill from the center of Guanajuato on the road that goes up to our center, CIMAT.  Their house is situated on a hill with stunning views of the city and it feels surprisingly rural.  To get to and from the center, we walk about 2-3 minutes down this kind of dirt road to the main road where the bus runs up to the center and down to the city.  Along the way we pass donkeys and cows and chickens!  So it definitely gives you that more traditional PC experience!  Her house is very modern, with satellite TV, internet, etc.  Where we will be living seems much more comfortable than our room here in Querétaro because she has a little private kind of one bedroom apartment in the bottom of the house where we will be staying.  It is two rooms connected by a bathroom (very low ceiling in the bathroom, so Antoine may have to stoop to shower!).  One of the rooms is set up as a living/dining room with a refrigerator and the other room is the bedroom.  The little apartment has a couch and a dining table with 4 chairs and desk.  So compared to our 8 x 10 foot room here with only one chair and a stool-it will almost be like having our place, so we are excited about that!

Last but not least, we got to visit the center where we will be working which is called CIMAT.  The first thing you notice about the center is that it is a collection of buildings built on-you guessed it, a steep hill!  And the architect in his wisdom decided he didn’t want to block the amazing views by putting in any handrails, so I spent two days huffing and puffing and teetering up and down cement stairs between floors!  The good news is that I definitely won’t have to join a gym here-I will get all my exercise just living in the city and going to the center!  It is going to be a challenging assignment on many levels.  Since it is mathematics research center, the researchers who work there tend to be relatively shy introverts and “in their heads”.  No joke that when our counterpart introduced us to one of the pure mathematics researchers, he said “hi” and them turned around and almost ran into a door because he was obviously thinking of some esoteric mathematical thing!  In addition, the center was built like a series of little rabbit hutches-so no gathering around the water cooler there.  So, it could be very challenging to meet with people and figure out how to interact with them on projects. 

The good news is that we really liked our Director.  He is this brilliant guy who has won the national prize for mathematics here in Mexico and written a number of math texts.  He seems really interested in our backgrounds and hopeful that we can help the centers focus on how to put more of mathematical research to work in the commercial area.  So if we have his support in that, we may actually be able to get some interesting things going.  Meanwhile, our counterparts have got a few starter project ideas for us to collaborate on. We are going to be helping with a web site project and also looking at some of the project management processes and software testing procedures!  So it feels very similar to the kind of work we have done back in the US.  They all want us to get some English discussion groups going.  That is one of the charters of the TT program here in Mexico because all of the researchers in the CONACYT centers need to speak and write in English to present at conferences and to publish papers.  So we will be working pretty actively with the post grad students to help them improve their English skills.