The Homefront

I’ve seen my home! And my school! I got to spend two days this week and two days last week visiting and observing the place that is going to be the focus of my life and all of my work and energy during my Peace Corps service over the course of the next two years. It’s funny because training is so overwhelming and all-encompassing that it’s really easy to lose sight of the big picture and forget that this is just a mini little intro-part to the actual experience that I’m going to remember. It was amazing to me when I first showed up at the school last week. The second I saw the students there, and started getting to know them, it made me realize how much I’ve missed my students in New York even though I’ve been so overloaded with all the other excitement and changes in my life that I haven’t done the feelings much justice. It was a wonderful being there though because that morning when everyone was going around introducing themselves to me, I really truly felt like I was home, where I was meant to be. I knew at that moment how right the place is going to be for me, and it made me really excited for the next and eventually more substantial part of this extremely multi-faceted adventure. The school is TINY… there are only about fifteen students on any given day and they are broken down into three small classrooms. A very large percentage of the students at the school have Down syndrome, which of course I’m thrilled about since it coincides with my personal experience and expertise. It’s so funny how they tell you with the Peace Corps to expect and be willing to go anywhere and do anything, and be prepared for what you do to not necessarily correlate with your personal prior experiences or training. So I psych myself up for whatever it is I might be doing, even if it’s something totally new for me, and then I end up working in a school to aid on teaching strategies and curriculum development for the exact population with which I’ve been working and developing my own strategies and curriculum for the past few years. Funny. So the place that I will be living for the next couple of years is actually on the school grounds… one of the three classrooms there has a second story which is a really cute two bedroom apartment that will be my new home. It is really cute and quite spacious… I’m not sure exactly what I plan on doing with four beds all to myself, but I’m hardly complaining. Maybe I can make up a rotation schedule and move around taking turns sleeping in each one to keep things interesting :) It’s a great location and setup because by being on the second floor it’s at the level of the foliage of all the trees outside so when you look out the many very large windows (it’s really open feeling which is great) you see the trees and hear all the birds chattering away in them. The current volunteer who lives there said her mom told her it felt like she lives in a treehouse. I liked that a lot and I thought it was a very apt description. The location is really nice because it’s in a really quiet neighborhoody area a few kilometers out of town. There’s nothing commercial in the area and you get the feeling that the traffic around there is exclusive to people who live in the area or attend the various local schools, which is a nice feeling. It’s only like a ten or fifteen minute bus ride into the center of Apia though, or probably a 15 to 20 minute bike ride, so it’s definitely close enough to not feel isolated. There will also be five of the other group 75 volunteers within a kilometer or two of me in that part of town or suburbia or whatever you want to call it, so that will be nice as well. Anyways, there’s the update regarding all that jazz… we’re going to be heading back out to the village on Saturday afternoon so I will try to check in again before I leave to tell all about the ten hours of language we’re going to be having each day between now and then. Woohoo!