Site Placements!

Another month has flown by! It feels like I have already experienced an entire lifetime. I can’t imagine how I will feel one year from now. It seems to me like time moves much slower whenever I leave the US—but much faster at the same time. My three months in Rwanda felt more like a year abroad. I once heard someone in our group say that in PC Colombia “the days are long and the weeks are short” (or something to that affect). Sometimes I feel as if the days here will never end! Waking up at 5:00am everyday (and mind you I am NOT a morning person), spending my 8am-5pm in training, returning home by 6pm, and passing out at 9pm, can be quite lengthy and exhausting. But somehow it seems that I wake up on Monday morning, then all of a sudden it’s Saturday night. If Peace Corps years are anything like college years, my time will be up before I know it. I still don’t know if that’s a good thing or not.

Site Placement

Part of my commitment to the Peace Corps requires me to live and work in a community (either in/around Barranquilla, Cartagena, or Santa Marta) for two years. After two months of having this very important day looming over us, site placement day finally came! Understandably, everyone was pretty stressed out when it was time to find out our fates. While we all pledged to be “flexible” with our placement, I’m sure that deep down everyone had one or two reasons why they preferred one site over another. From before I even landed in Colombia I knew that I wanted to be placed in Cartagena—primarily because I wanted to work within an Afro-Colombian community. Through my extensive (and at times obsessive) pre-departure research I found out that Cartagena was home the largest Afro-Colombian community on the coast. It seemed natural for me to work with this community. I saw it as a way to further my education and experience within the African Diaspora. I live in the States, I’m West Indian-American, and have already been to Africa. It was time for me to acquaint myself with Afro-Latino culture. In addition, I wasn’t too keen on staying in the constant hustle and bustle of Barranquilla.

Some people were secretive about their preferred placements. Others insisted that they would be fine with wherever they were placed. I told everyone from day one what my intentions were. So by site placement time, everyone knew exactly where I wanted to go and why. I also got the feeling that they were all silently rooting for me to get exactly what I wanted (like I was doing for them). The actual site placement “ceremony” was stressful. It began with one of the PC staff reading a name from a folder and revealing their placement. Then that person would pick another folder, read the name, the person would get up, and the staff would reveal their placement. I knew that there were around 19 Barranquilla sites (including small pueblos in the Atlantico region), 5 or 6 in Santa Marta, and 5 in Cartagena—it felt like the odds were not in my favor. My some stroke of bad luck I was one of the last names to be read off. My heart thudded in my chest with each reveal. I relaxed a little bit as more and more people got Barranquilla placements—it meant that I was less likely to end up there. But then there was only one more Cartagena site left, my site! One of my friends was snapping reaction photos of everyone after they got the news. I look more relieved than anything, the stress was real!

Site Visits

For two years I will be living and working in a smallish community outside of Cartagena city. After meeting our counterparts (the English educators that we will be working with throughout our service) the following Tuesday we all headed out to our respective sites for a three day visit. My site looks very different from any part of Barranquilla I have ever been in. Its more in line with the image that I (and I’m sure many others) had of what “real” Peace Corps looks like. As one of the few urban placements, PC Colombia is not the typical “secluded village in the middle of the bush”. In Barranquilla all of us have running water, electricity, and most of us have washing machines and wifi (which is definitely a luxury here). My site placement is much less developed and has a clearly visible income disparity to the Old City in Cartagena. However this did not make the community any less appealing. I got to visit the school on Wednesday to meet the students and some of the teachers. Everyone was very welcoming and made me feel right at home. I was also surprised and relieved to find out that there were two other volunteers from the US working in my school. So in addition to me, there are two World Teach Volunteers, and an Austrian foundation in the barrio. One of the only downsides is the heat. It’s even hotter than Barranquilla and my barrio is supposedly even hotter than Cartagena city. I’m going to be drinking a ton of water!

In less than a month I’ll be moving in and starting a new chapter in my life. I can’t wait!