March 8, 2010

Hey everyone.

We've completed our training week. It was an amazing experience, which Lena and I wrote up in beautiful and poetic terms on our computer which has no access to the internet. I will email it to you sometime. Suffice it to say, what we came away with the most is the sense that we've signed onto the Peace Corps with the most amazing group of people you could gather in one room. We have ex-marines, a 70-something-year-old couple, business men and counselors and social workers and all of them have tremendous stories behind what brought them here.

Also, we had an earthquake. A tremblor, really (it was only 4.2), but it was my first earthquake. Nothing happened. I though someone was running across the roof - we had just finished a safety session, where there had been some skits of robberies and hold-ups, and for some reason I was momentarily convinced someone was running across our roof in order to jump down into our apartment and rob us. This was not, in fact, the case.

On Saturday, we were place with our host families, who will house us for the next 11 weeks. Lena is way out in the country in a place called Rio Conejo. She already knows everyone in the town, found a newt in her room (which she wanted to keep and her host mom wanted to kill), and became the center of an impromptu parade through town when everyone came out of their houses to see the new gringos.

I'm in a pueblito called Rio Azul - though, technically, I'm in Quebadras, which is just the part where Rio Azul ends. It's a tiny suburb of San Jose, where the dump used to be (and is now a hill behind the soccer stadium), packed with concrete-block houses stacked on tin-plate houses stacked on houses made of whatever anyone could find. It's very poor, but it's also very safe. During the daytime, at least, which is the only time my host mom, Jenny, will let me out of the house. My Mama Tica has three sons, Marvin (14), Jeicol (13), and Tayron (7), all of whom are really fun to hang out with and amazingly laid back about having a gringo come and live in their house. I came into the house expecting a humble house, with a single flickering lightbulb and concrete floors or something, but I was instead greeted by Jeicol asking me to play Grand Theft Auto (a horribly violent video game) with him and mom watching "Kicking & Screaming" (translated into Spanish) on DVD. Last night, I taught the kids how to play chess, partly in order to avoid more questions about if San Andreas, CA, is actually like what the video game makes it look like. I have my own room, a very, very cold shower, and the ability to lock my own door, which is nice. I feel like my Spanish is already improving, though I've been getting headaches every night from the effort. Jenny cooks me "comida tipica", which is usually rice and beans and some mysterious fried thing. There is a lot of grease in everything, and everyone is shocked that I'm only drinking water instead of Coke.