Swearing In & Host Family Life in Guanajuato

As of last April 19^th, we are no longer PCTs (Peace Corps Trainees) but are now PCVs! (Peace Corp Volunteers).  Our service will end officially on April 18^th, 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. 

After the ceremony itself, we visited with our center directors, host families and PC staff for a while.  At that point, our center director and counterpart colleague were invited along with the other important guests to one of the CONACyT research centers for lunch with the Embassy representative.  Meanwhile, we went back to our host family’s house, packed our things and went back to the center to await our ride to Guanajuato-our new home base for the next two years!  Before I change the subject and talk more about our first days here in Guanajuato, here is a photo taken after the ceremony.  The Embassy person is the tall woman in front of Antoine in the light blue jacket.  Behind me is Sam, our youngest volunteer from our group, headed out to work in the rural area of Puebla near where they are constructing a giant telescope. He is hoping to work with some of the surrounding villages on eco-technical projects.  The other people in the right side of the photo are the other 3 new PCVs from our group.  Two of them are staying in Querétaro working at Universities and Salvador, standing next to our Assistant Director Kitty Kaping, will be living in Leon.  Finally, the last two people in the photo are Beatriz Charles, our program manager, and in the back row middle, our country director, Dan Evans.


 

 

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.

Floating...

 

So no news from the placement officer yet.  The email we received on the 5th of July said that it will be 4-6 weeks before our phone interview, so in the meantime we are enjoying our time in Europe and taking advantage of being here to visit some of the tourist sites nearby.  Even though the photo above was taken while we were at the beach on the Atlantic ocean, we are actually in Normandy at the moment.  So a lot less ocean and a lot more happy cows!  Normandy is one of the prime areas in France that produces wonderful butter and cheese, so we are spoiled for choice in terms of delicious dairy products.  I will say it will be hard to give up the choice and variety of foods we have here when we go to the Peace Corps.  I am already trying to figure out how much space I can take in my suitcases for spices and such!

We are going to visit a castle nearby today.  It is called the Chateau d'Anet and was built for Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of Henry II of France from 1547 to 1552.  Here is a link to wikipedia where you can read all about it and a photo of the caste.  Amazing to me that it could be built in 5 years back in the 16th century!

Wikipedia, Chateau d'Anet

Next Steps Next

Just a few days after we received our medical clearance, we were contacted by a placement assistant and asked to submit our updated resumes.  As I said, after months of waiting, all the sudden everything seems like it is on fast forward now!  Although it seems somewhat unreal, it is also exciting to contemplate next steps.  It sound like what happens next from reading other blogs is that we will be contacted by the Placement Officer to set up a time to talk.  At that point, we should have a much better idea of where we are in the process and what to expect next.

Better Late than Never!

Since we have just received our medical clearance, I thought it was about time that I started to create a blog.  The Peace Corps Journals site has been so helpful as we go through the application process, I feel that I should also contribute to help other applicants learn more about the process-at least from our perspective.  I also would love to hear from other people in the PC "orbit" as we move through our passage-other applicants and especially other folks applying and serving as couples and/or those applying and serving who are over 50.  I know there are many of you and we would love to connect.

We are nominated for French speaking Africa leaving in October 2011.  My husband is nominated in business and I am nominated in the health area. That's all we know for now, but as many of you know, lots of things can change between nomination and invitation, so we are staying open to all possibilities.

After the long "hibernation" of waiting through the medical clearance phase of the journey, things are starting to speed up and feel very real all of a sudden!  We still have lots of unknown-the biggest two being whether we will really leave in October and whether our nomination will remain the same.