I had the luck of being selected to live and work in beautiful Bahia de Caraquez, a coastal resort town in the Province of Manabi. It is a town of about 50,000 people, located on a peninsula in the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by water on 3 sides, clean, picturesque and absolutely charming. I am still kind of reeling that this is my Peace Corps post. There is not a hardship to be had it seems. I will spend my 2 years living in a modern, oceanside city, in an apartment similar to what I would in any US city. I'm really feeling like a Posh Corps volunteer....but know that I will find my work and life in Bahia very rewarding in almost the opposite way that I did in Madagascar.
When I arrived for site visit, the information I had about Bahia and my job there were pretty vague, so I was anxious to arrive, meet with my counterpart and get to know my new host family.
Day 1: I arrived late. Very LATE. In fact, by the time I arrived to Bahia, I had my first surprise: my counterpart had already left to a meeting in Portoviejo, 2 hours away and she would be gone all day. As soon as I pulled into the terminal, the INFA truck picked me up and took me to the office. It was clear as soon as I arrived no one knew what I was here for or what they were supposed to do with me for the day. There was another girl from the Netherlands in the office too, she wants to volunteer with special needs kids in Bahia, so she tagged along for the day too. The next surprise of the day: I was dropped of at my “host family's” house. My host family equaled a 22 year old girl, who works at INFA and lives in a 1-bedroom apartment. (not really within the PC expectations for a host family in anyway...) I changed, got ready for the day and started making some visits with my escorts...more surprises: it soon became clear that my escorts for the day believe that I am a specialist in Special Needs – as far from the truth as possible! (I would love to work with special needs kids, but I don't know anything about the field!) Angela, one of the women in the office, is under the impression that any foreigner that comes to work with kids in Ecuador, is here just for the Special Needs kids, like the girl who is in town from the Netherlands...(in the end I AM going to work with the Special Needs center, but more with creating family training program and collaborating with the center, than direct care.)
Next I go to lunch with some women from the INFA office and after we finish, they say its beach time!...so Judy (my “host” chica) takes me home to change and we spend the afternoon walking and sitting on the beach. Later that evening we meet up with Emmalee my site mate and eat pizza for dinner. I am left thinking: I am supposed to have a job and task here...day one is over and I have no idea what this office does, and I realize that I have a place to stay these 3 days, but no place to live after I swear-in!
Day 2: I arrive to the INFA office at 8am and am greeted by my counterpart, Yvonne. We sit down in her office (which is like an air-conditioned ice box!), she asks me what I think about Bahia, what my education is, and tells me that there is a lot of work to be done here. Bueno. She also tells me that the structure of INFA is changing completely - in January the organization went from being a private to a government agency, and things are quite complex now. By 8:30 Yvonne's office fills up with the whole INFA team for a meeting, and by 9am she is on her way to Portoviejo, again. Meanwhile, the whole INFA team is swirling about the office, and I am thinking again: what am I doing here!? On her way out the door, Yvonne tells me I'll be spending the day with Angela (the one who thinks I am a special needs specialist...) to show me what an average day of a tecnico is all about. Angela informs me she has some appointments scheduled starting at 10. “Great” I say, “I'd love to come along.” I spend the next hour, sorting through my paperwork getting an idea of what I need to accomplish the following day with Yvonne, and am on the phone with my program director, Cris, letting her know that my housing situation is not going to work out as is...
A few minutes before 10, Angela and I depart to the same office as before, for special needs kids. The group is in a training session. Unbeknown to me, I am about to be abandoned. Angela accompanies me upstairs, I sit down at the table, greet everyone, and they Angela peaces out and says she'll be back for me in the “tarde.” When!? She doesn't know, I don't want to make a scene, so I take out my notebook, listen and participate in the training. The meeting ends at 12, and I remain at the table, not knowing what to do with myself. Glory to grace, I get a call from my site-mate Emmalee asking if I would like to have lunch with she and her counterpart. Yes!!!! I say my goodbyes and grab a taxi (communal taxis only cost 25 cents! holler!) downtown to the Municipal where Emmalee will work.
I walk up to La Oficina de la Mujer (the Office of the Woman) I am instantly impressed with all of the women there and Emmalee's counterpart, Jacqueline. She is a brilliant, motivated, hardworking woman who has it together! She is a single mother, a respected director and she commands respect while caring for everyone who crosses her path. And she says she will help me find a place to live after work. Hallelujah!
“La Oficina de la Mujer” does a lot of consulting and event planning in the city as well as help women and children in abusive situations, they also have multiple campaigns related to reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, and healthy relationships, and generally are just a resource for women and children in Bahia. At lunch I realize it is day 2 of my site visit and know more about Emmalee's projects and office than I know about mine...hmmm. I'm suddenly concerned for myself!
After lunch, Emmalee's counterpart excuses us to spend the afternoon wandering around Bahia, sampling some delicious local snacks and just soaking up this sweet spot. We stopped by INFA to find that Angela wants me nowhere around, and the other tecnicos are all out on visits (that I could have been on too!!!!), so we wandered around some more....
At 5:30, we meet Jacqueline to start the great apartment/vivencia search for me. We walked up and down the streets of Bahia checking out apartments that were being rented and I found out that living arrangement in Bahia are super nice and expensive! Not quite the PC arrangements I had pictured for myself...late in the evening I was worried that Judy and I were not going to find an apartment in the two days (Cris, my program manager, approved that I could have a roommate instead of a host family, and Judy said she would prefer to live with a roommate as opposed to alone, so we set out to find a 2 bedroom apartment). The last place we went to look at was just a one bedroom apartment behind a house, like a mother-in-law apartment. When I arrived I knew it was the best option I had seen, not too big, or fancy, very secure and safe, it seemed like I had found a place to live, at least temporarily...then the woman, Karla, said she had a room in her house that was unoccupied and asked if I would like to see it. So I went, and the more time I spent with Karla and her son Carlos ( I know, cute right?) I realized what a great family they would be to live with! So, I found a place to live and a host family all at once! I think it is going to be a really great living arrangement. They have lived with Americans before, in Chile, and Carlos was so excited that I would be moving in, he was actually bouncing! whew! At this point it was pretty late, I was tired, and I had done so much stressing that mid-day my sickness had progressed into a sinus infection with my face swelling, head aching, and teeth throbbing! What a mess! I still didn't know that INFA had in store for me for work, but at least I had now had a place to live!
Day 3:
Again, I arrived to the INFA office at 8 am to meet with my counterpart Ivonne. She was already at her desk sifting through reports and verifying things when I arrived. Then I had the best news of my site visit: we were going to spend the whole day together, talking about INFA, the needs of the community and her plan for me. FINALLY!!! In just a few words, my day was amazing.
She and I spent the majority of the morning talking about development theory, the structure of the office, and the role she wants me to play in both. She told me very directly that she wants me to do a lot of community analysis and needs assessment (which I am going to train the tecnicos to do, because we work in 4 Cantones -like counties- and I can only do so many interviews!). Next we talked about program sustainability. Ivonne strongly believes in sustainable development, in fact its a passion of hers... (she gave me her thesis to review so that we are on the same page about her methodology...) This is also Peace Corps' main goal of our work too; the idea is that we are facilitating, training, and supporting rather than leading and doing the work ourselves. This can be a hard accord to achieve because it is easier to just to it ourselves than to get people on the same page as us, with language barriers and cultural differences. Ivonne told me straight away, I would be responsible for helping staff members plan workshops and community activities, but in the field, my ultimate role would be to observe and improve, rather than do, the work directly. The reason being if I do the work in the field, then community members get used to seeing me, then when I leave, they lose their confidence in the program and progress stops.
The more time Ivonne and I talked, the more I am realized what an amazing post I was given. Theoretically, I will impact the communities my INFA office serves in the long-term because I am training and empowering people to do their work better versus doing the work myself. It was kind of bitter pill to take that I wouldn't get to be playing with kids and hanging out with youth all of the time, but then I realized there is a daycare center attached to the INFA office, which is always understaffed. That means that at any point in my day, there are kids just across the fence, who want to show me their skills on the jungle gym or a baby who need to be held, loved and talked to. Precious.
Later in the day, Ivonne took me out to a few of the barrios on the outskirts of town that INFA works in. These communities started as squatter settlements, and the city has built some infrastructure around them so that basic health and sanitation requirements are met. There are many government and church sponsored daycare and lunch programs out in these barrios because children are generally left alone while parents are at work, and school is universal here, but not obligatory, so many kids are not in school during the day. Ivonne told me that abuse (physical and sexual) is a huge problem out here, and kids grow up in the presence of too much alcohol and drugs, along with exposure to gang activity, community violence and other negative influences. It was heart-breaking to see hungry children who light up when anyone talks to them about anything. But I needed to see these barrios and understand the challenges that exist outside of the urban area and need to be addressed. I want to be out in these communities each week, because living in beautiful central Bahia, it would be easy to forget the poverty that exists in the margins of the community and focus on the urban youth who are very middle-class and privileged in comparison.
Additionally, there is a human rights center that is opening in Bahia this month. It is staffed and funded, but not programmed – so I am going to be working with the staff to set goals and initiatives to educate the community about human rights ranging from child rights, to reproductive health rights, to everything! I am super excited to learn and develop along with the professional staff and be a part of their initialization! There are also two young women from Spain, who are special needs experts, and there are opening a special needs school and center in Bahia; I will be collaborating with them to build a parent support center for special needs kids and developing a training program for parents to better support and nurture special needs kids and prepare them for adulthood. Amazing! Gaul, one of the tecnicos and I, already have plans to get a youth leadership group off the ground this fall, we just need to get the ball rolling! There are a million things that Ivonne and I discussed in this one day, I have no doubt that I will be BUSY for two years in Bahia! One thing Ivonne and I are going to work on together is opening a Children's Library with regular educational programming and activities. This is one of her life goals for the community, and I think it will be a great addition to the resources that exist in the community and I am honored that she wants me to collaborate with her.
And so my site visit went...it started out slow with many doubts, but ended with me feeling like I have a place in the office and a lot of really great work opportunities ahead of me. Just as any successful site visit should be, I didn't want to go back to training...I just wanted to get settled and get started with the next two years of life and work in Bahia!
When I arrived for site visit, the information I had about Bahia and my job there were pretty vague, so I was anxious to arrive, meet with my counterpart and get to know my new host family.
Day 1: I arrived late. Very LATE. In fact, by the time I arrived to Bahia, I had my first surprise: my counterpart had already left to a meeting in Portoviejo, 2 hours away and she would be gone all day. As soon as I pulled into the terminal, the INFA truck picked me up and took me to the office. It was clear as soon as I arrived no one knew what I was here for or what they were supposed to do with me for the day. There was another girl from the Netherlands in the office too, she wants to volunteer with special needs kids in Bahia, so she tagged along for the day too. The next surprise of the day: I was dropped of at my “host family's” house. My host family equaled a 22 year old girl, who works at INFA and lives in a 1-bedroom apartment. (not really within the PC expectations for a host family in anyway...) I changed, got ready for the day and started making some visits with my escorts...more surprises: it soon became clear that my escorts for the day believe that I am a specialist in Special Needs – as far from the truth as possible! (I would love to work with special needs kids, but I don't know anything about the field!) Angela, one of the women in the office, is under the impression that any foreigner that comes to work with kids in Ecuador, is here just for the Special Needs kids, like the girl who is in town from the Netherlands...(in the end I AM going to work with the Special Needs center, but more with creating family training program and collaborating with the center, than direct care.)
Next I go to lunch with some women from the INFA office and after we finish, they say its beach time!...so Judy (my “host” chica) takes me home to change and we spend the afternoon walking and sitting on the beach. Later that evening we meet up with Emmalee my site mate and eat pizza for dinner. I am left thinking: I am supposed to have a job and task here...day one is over and I have no idea what this office does, and I realize that I have a place to stay these 3 days, but no place to live after I swear-in!
Day 2: I arrive to the INFA office at 8am and am greeted by my counterpart, Yvonne. We sit down in her office (which is like an air-conditioned ice box!), she asks me what I think about Bahia, what my education is, and tells me that there is a lot of work to be done here. Bueno. She also tells me that the structure of INFA is changing completely - in January the organization went from being a private to a government agency, and things are quite complex now. By 8:30 Yvonne's office fills up with the whole INFA team for a meeting, and by 9am she is on her way to Portoviejo, again. Meanwhile, the whole INFA team is swirling about the office, and I am thinking again: what am I doing here!? On her way out the door, Yvonne tells me I'll be spending the day with Angela (the one who thinks I am a special needs specialist...) to show me what an average day of a tecnico is all about. Angela informs me she has some appointments scheduled starting at 10. “Great” I say, “I'd love to come along.” I spend the next hour, sorting through my paperwork getting an idea of what I need to accomplish the following day with Yvonne, and am on the phone with my program director, Cris, letting her know that my housing situation is not going to work out as is...
A few minutes before 10, Angela and I depart to the same office as before, for special needs kids. The group is in a training session. Unbeknown to me, I am about to be abandoned. Angela accompanies me upstairs, I sit down at the table, greet everyone, and they Angela peaces out and says she'll be back for me in the “tarde.” When!? She doesn't know, I don't want to make a scene, so I take out my notebook, listen and participate in the training. The meeting ends at 12, and I remain at the table, not knowing what to do with myself. Glory to grace, I get a call from my site-mate Emmalee asking if I would like to have lunch with she and her counterpart. Yes!!!! I say my goodbyes and grab a taxi (communal taxis only cost 25 cents! holler!) downtown to the Municipal where Emmalee will work.
I walk up to La Oficina de la Mujer (the Office of the Woman) I am instantly impressed with all of the women there and Emmalee's counterpart, Jacqueline. She is a brilliant, motivated, hardworking woman who has it together! She is a single mother, a respected director and she commands respect while caring for everyone who crosses her path. And she says she will help me find a place to live after work. Hallelujah!
“La Oficina de la Mujer” does a lot of consulting and event planning in the city as well as help women and children in abusive situations, they also have multiple campaigns related to reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, and healthy relationships, and generally are just a resource for women and children in Bahia. At lunch I realize it is day 2 of my site visit and know more about Emmalee's projects and office than I know about mine...hmmm. I'm suddenly concerned for myself!
After lunch, Emmalee's counterpart excuses us to spend the afternoon wandering around Bahia, sampling some delicious local snacks and just soaking up this sweet spot. We stopped by INFA to find that Angela wants me nowhere around, and the other tecnicos are all out on visits (that I could have been on too!!!!), so we wandered around some more....
At 5:30, we meet Jacqueline to start the great apartment/vivencia search for me. We walked up and down the streets of Bahia checking out apartments that were being rented and I found out that living arrangement in Bahia are super nice and expensive! Not quite the PC arrangements I had pictured for myself...late in the evening I was worried that Judy and I were not going to find an apartment in the two days (Cris, my program manager, approved that I could have a roommate instead of a host family, and Judy said she would prefer to live with a roommate as opposed to alone, so we set out to find a 2 bedroom apartment). The last place we went to look at was just a one bedroom apartment behind a house, like a mother-in-law apartment. When I arrived I knew it was the best option I had seen, not too big, or fancy, very secure and safe, it seemed like I had found a place to live, at least temporarily...then the woman, Karla, said she had a room in her house that was unoccupied and asked if I would like to see it. So I went, and the more time I spent with Karla and her son Carlos ( I know, cute right?) I realized what a great family they would be to live with! So, I found a place to live and a host family all at once! I think it is going to be a really great living arrangement. They have lived with Americans before, in Chile, and Carlos was so excited that I would be moving in, he was actually bouncing! whew! At this point it was pretty late, I was tired, and I had done so much stressing that mid-day my sickness had progressed into a sinus infection with my face swelling, head aching, and teeth throbbing! What a mess! I still didn't know that INFA had in store for me for work, but at least I had now had a place to live!
Day 3:
Again, I arrived to the INFA office at 8 am to meet with my counterpart Ivonne. She was already at her desk sifting through reports and verifying things when I arrived. Then I had the best news of my site visit: we were going to spend the whole day together, talking about INFA, the needs of the community and her plan for me. FINALLY!!! In just a few words, my day was amazing.
She and I spent the majority of the morning talking about development theory, the structure of the office, and the role she wants me to play in both. She told me very directly that she wants me to do a lot of community analysis and needs assessment (which I am going to train the tecnicos to do, because we work in 4 Cantones -like counties- and I can only do so many interviews!). Next we talked about program sustainability. Ivonne strongly believes in sustainable development, in fact its a passion of hers... (she gave me her thesis to review so that we are on the same page about her methodology...) This is also Peace Corps' main goal of our work too; the idea is that we are facilitating, training, and supporting rather than leading and doing the work ourselves. This can be a hard accord to achieve because it is easier to just to it ourselves than to get people on the same page as us, with language barriers and cultural differences. Ivonne told me straight away, I would be responsible for helping staff members plan workshops and community activities, but in the field, my ultimate role would be to observe and improve, rather than do, the work directly. The reason being if I do the work in the field, then community members get used to seeing me, then when I leave, they lose their confidence in the program and progress stops.
The more time Ivonne and I talked, the more I am realized what an amazing post I was given. Theoretically, I will impact the communities my INFA office serves in the long-term because I am training and empowering people to do their work better versus doing the work myself. It was kind of bitter pill to take that I wouldn't get to be playing with kids and hanging out with youth all of the time, but then I realized there is a daycare center attached to the INFA office, which is always understaffed. That means that at any point in my day, there are kids just across the fence, who want to show me their skills on the jungle gym or a baby who need to be held, loved and talked to. Precious.
Later in the day, Ivonne took me out to a few of the barrios on the outskirts of town that INFA works in. These communities started as squatter settlements, and the city has built some infrastructure around them so that basic health and sanitation requirements are met. There are many government and church sponsored daycare and lunch programs out in these barrios because children are generally left alone while parents are at work, and school is universal here, but not obligatory, so many kids are not in school during the day. Ivonne told me that abuse (physical and sexual) is a huge problem out here, and kids grow up in the presence of too much alcohol and drugs, along with exposure to gang activity, community violence and other negative influences. It was heart-breaking to see hungry children who light up when anyone talks to them about anything. But I needed to see these barrios and understand the challenges that exist outside of the urban area and need to be addressed. I want to be out in these communities each week, because living in beautiful central Bahia, it would be easy to forget the poverty that exists in the margins of the community and focus on the urban youth who are very middle-class and privileged in comparison.
Additionally, there is a human rights center that is opening in Bahia this month. It is staffed and funded, but not programmed – so I am going to be working with the staff to set goals and initiatives to educate the community about human rights ranging from child rights, to reproductive health rights, to everything! I am super excited to learn and develop along with the professional staff and be a part of their initialization! There are also two young women from Spain, who are special needs experts, and there are opening a special needs school and center in Bahia; I will be collaborating with them to build a parent support center for special needs kids and developing a training program for parents to better support and nurture special needs kids and prepare them for adulthood. Amazing! Gaul, one of the tecnicos and I, already have plans to get a youth leadership group off the ground this fall, we just need to get the ball rolling! There are a million things that Ivonne and I discussed in this one day, I have no doubt that I will be BUSY for two years in Bahia! One thing Ivonne and I are going to work on together is opening a Children's Library with regular educational programming and activities. This is one of her life goals for the community, and I think it will be a great addition to the resources that exist in the community and I am honored that she wants me to collaborate with her.
And so my site visit went...it started out slow with many doubts, but ended with me feeling like I have a place in the office and a lot of really great work opportunities ahead of me. Just as any successful site visit should be, I didn't want to go back to training...I just wanted to get settled and get started with the next two years of life and work in Bahia!
2 comments:
WOW! Whitney, that is so great!!! I love your post. I really hope that you can add one more project to your list with GSBI and a school in that beautiful Bahia! - Ronda
AMAZING!
It seems you've found an area that needs you and will help you on your own path to being super whitney! :)
sounds like you'll get to do it all, women's issues even a library for the ninos! i can't wait to hear about the passionate women you work with... and your self picked host family sounds fabulous!
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