As of last April 19th, we are no longer PCTs
(Peace Corps Trainees) but are now PCVs! (Peace Corp Volunteers). Our service will end officially on April 18th,
2014. The swearing in ceremony took
place in the garden area of the Peace Corps Offices in Querétaro
and we were officially sworn in by Laura Dogu, who is the number two person in
charge at the US Embassy in Mexico. The ambassador
was supposed to do the honors but had a last minute change of schedule in
conjunction with the G20 conference.
We chose Salvador, our fellow volunteer who is originally from Spain,
to do our five minutes volunteer speech in Spanish. He did a great job and even though we took
the easy way out as a group choosing our Spanish speaker to give the speech, in
terms of presentation skills and personality, he was a very good choice to do
the honors. The ceremony was more emotional than I had expected. I am not sure if this was due to the ceremony
itself or only our vast relief at finally finishing our 10 weeks of grueling
training! Even though we consider
ourselves lucky in terms of being assigned to Mexico, the training experience
seems to be difficult no matter where in the world you do your service. Between classes running six days a week and
the anxiety about your future service, it seems to universally be the part of the
Peace Corps experience that everyone is glad to see come to an end! Speaking of classes, as far as we know, we
all made it successfully to the “intermediate low” level of Spanish
that is required for our program. So
that at least means that we aren’t on language “probation”. That said, once we get just a bit more
settled, Antoine and I want to start to see what we can do with online
resources to continue trying to improve our language. We also plan to get a television, which we
don’t currently have, in order to get more practice listening to Spanish.
So, after the ceremony we were able to ride up to Guanajuato with our counterpart Laura and her driver. We are
currently living with our new host family in an area up above the city center
called “Los Filtros”. It is a little
residential enclave about a two minutes’ walk from the main highway that runs between the
city center and our CONACyT center called CIMAT where we are working. We love our new host mom, Rosi. She is a single mom with three sons. Since two of them study in Querétaro, it is quiet most of the week and we live downstairs in a little separate studio apartment, which is a huge improvement over the single small room we had at our first host family's house. The bathroom is built into a passageway and have a very low ceiling so poor Antoine has hit his head at least once that I know of and has to duck to shower, but neither of us are complaining since we are so happy to have a much more comfortable space.
The walk is surprisingly bucolic-we walk by a
corral with cows, horses and mother hens being followed around by the cutest
little baby chicks! Every so often, for
some unknown reason we will walk by and see one of the cows alone standing
outside the corral or wandering up our little dirt road. That is the moment that we realize we are
actually having a Peace Corps moment despite working at a mathematics research center
with all the comforts of home.
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