We're here!

Well, we're here. It's been a busy few weeks between getting packed up, moved out, and orientated. Everything went great in our first week. We have a half of a day off today (Saturday) and a free day tomorrow as well, so we're just now getting a chance to relax a bit.

On Monday, we arrived in Washington DC pretty close to on time & had our "staging event" for a day and a half where we met our training group. Aside from packing a little bit too heavy, everything went smooth.

On Wednesday, we woke up at 2 am to get ready for our flight to Guatemala City. The flight was delayed a bit, but we still landed in the early afternoon. Folks from the Peace Corps were there waiting for us all & had a couple mini-buses/vans to drive us to the training site in Santa Lucia. It's pretty warm, probably upper 70s (although it did rain this morning). They have an amazing site here, a little oasis with clean green grass, clean bathrooms, hot showers, and decent internet access. It's where we'll be doing our training session for the next three months with the entire group.

Eventually, we loaded into the vans and got dropped off at out brand new "host family". We have a great family. They don't speak english at all, so our spanish is coming along pretty well-->but we have a long way to go(Corby more than Kari). It's amazing how easy it is to spend time with them and talk/play even though we can't communicate easily.

Since then, we've been sitting in lectures about staying healthy, safety, spanish, and technical skills. It looks like we'll be doing slightly different programs --> Kari: Environmental Education, Corby: Ecotourism.

Sounds like our host family may take us to Antigua tomorrow to have a look around. We'll be traveling together to visit the Volcano Pacaya with a fairly large group on Monday. Probably a short hike & a visit with a current volunteer doing ecotourism work there. It also sounds like quite a bit more traveling is on our way in the next few months during training...

That's basically the latest news. We'll write more later.

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