Month two of training is almost complete!

Blogging once a month is nearly impossible, because there is so much to tell.

But, here’s a moment: I finish training early and spend an afternoon lying in the hammock on my veranda, reading and napping and watching the kissadees build their nest in the corner of our roof.  My host grandmother wove the hammock.  Timmax, my host brother, is downstairs building a kite in preparation for Easter.  (They don’t dye eggs here, they fly kites.  However, I promised my neighbors an egg hunt this Easter!)  Baby Queenie crawls out onto the veranda and pulls herself up to standing using the hammock, tells me cheerfully, “Ma ma ma,” as she tries to grab the book out of my hands.

Another moment: I walk to visit another Peace Corps trainee, greeting people I know (and those I don’t) along the way.  In Guyana, neighbors are neighborly!   I gaff (Guyanese for chat) for a few minutes with a family sitting out on their porch, and they encourage me to stop by and spend more time with them in the future. A few nursery-school-aged girls follow me for a few minutes in their red-and-white-checkered blouses, holding hands and giggling.  The novelty of having white people in town is slow to wear off for them.   When I arrive at my fellow trainee’s house, she isn’t home, but her host sisters agree to take me to her grandmother’s house—her grandmother has a dog that just had puppies, and I want to adopt one!  I ogle the week-old puppies for a few minutes while Grandma tells me about the different kinds of fruits and vegetables she grows to sell.  The girls take me back to their house, where their mother hacks open a coconut for me to drink the milk.  More gaffing, then I head home.

These moments are priceless:  When baby Queenie reaches out to me for me to pick her up.  When TImmax’s eyes light up as I’m quizzing him on letter sounds and he gets one right.  When I’m walking back to training and two third-grade girls who I taught the day before run up to me and each one holds one of my hands.  When a woman who I visited just to buy vegetables invites me into her home, gives me food and drink and tells me I must visit regularly.  When I cook, Guyanese style, and the results are edible and I can tell my host parents are proud of me.  When I compliment a teacher’s shoes and she offers to take me shopping in Georgetown!  When I walk into a shop where people are liming (hanging out), and I gaff with them and they laugh at my jokes—or, better yet, when they tell me that I’m a mission girl now!

By a mission girl, they mean that I am a resident of St. Cuthbert’s Mission!  That’s right—I’m the one lucky volunteer from our group who gets to stay at our training site for my full two years in country.  One week from today is our swearing-in as full-fledged Peace Corps Volunteers, and while eight trainees will leave St. Cuthbert’s for other regions of Guyana, I’ll come right back home.  I’ll move into a house of my own, only a few minutes’ walk away from the host family I’m living with now.  One of the many perks of staying in St. Cuthbert’s is free and readily accessible internet, so there is no reason why I shouldn’t be able to update this blog more frequently; say, once a week?  At any rate, anticipate another post soon!

Two Weeks in St. Cuthbert's: A List

1. I have an amazing host family! Charlene, my host mom, is 25; Timor, my host dad, is 30; Timmax is my five-year-old host brother and Shaqueena—Queenie—is almost ten months old! 
2. I am eating chicken, fried rice, curry, plantains, LOTS of fresh pine (pineapple), fish, bellange (eggplant) and pine tarts!  I can make bake and roti, two different kinds of bread…with a little guidance at least.
3. I have no running water in the house, but a pipe pumps it into my backyard.  That’s what I use for (cold) showers, washing dishes, and making tea—my family drinks it but I can’t be cause my body has no resistance to all the creepy crawlies living in it.
4. We have two dogs named Blackie and Brownie.  Yesterday, Brownie peed on my leg.  Maybe that’s his way of accepting me into the community?
5. Speaking of peeing…outhouses aren’t really that bad.  Unless you get locked inside one, which happened to me once.  Bobby pins and watches are good tools for escape.
6. Speaking of peeing, again…I have a pee bucket called a “tinny” that resides under my bed.  It’s kinda awkward to use but preferable to braving the outhouse at 2AM.
7. We have generator-run electricity from 6PM to 10PM every night!
8. St. Cuthbert’s just got a computer lab a few weeks ago—incredibly good timing, no? Especially since that means wireless internet access in the youth center that we use as a training building!  My host parents are both taking computer classes three times a week, and they’re really excited to practice their typing on my computer.
9. I have two hammocks in my house—my host grandma made them!
10. Aforementioned house is two stories, made of wood…downstairs is a big kitchen and a small shop that mostly just functions as a bar in the evenings.  The bedrooms are upstairs--I do have my own room, but I only have a sheet for a door.
11. Timmax, my host brother, loves playing slapjack and listening to the Beatles on my iPod.
12. Queenie, my host sister, is crawling up a storm, and I’m fairly certain she’ll be walking before I leave.  She’s also fascinated with my glasses, or as Timmax calls them, my “specs.”
13. Lizards hang out in my room at night.
14. I met someone with a pet anteater yesterday.
15. I’ve been to two birthday parties since I’ve been here!
16. My days start early…I run with some other trainees at 6AM most mornings, then I bathe, eat breakfast, and go to class at 8.  I only have a five-minute walk to my classroom, which is a small cement building right next to the primary school (which means that the kids come and stare in the windows at us on their breaks).  Training lasts till about 4:30, when I go home and help with dinner.  By 9:00 I’m exhausted, and by the time the lights go out at 10 I’m usually asleep!
17. Training is on several topics: safety and security, health, cultural integration, and technical training in education. 
18. I’ve taken the 10-minute walk down to the river to swim or bathe a few times with my family.  They call the river water “blackwater”—it’s the color of strong tea.
19. The first time we went down to the river, we saw a snake! It was bright green and it swam across the river, and then my host dad beat it to death with a stick.
20. Next Wednesday, March 16^th, I will find out my permanent placement…and then on Saturday I’ll go there to visit!!  I am really, really, really excited to see the community I’m going to be living in for the next two years.

Twenty is a nice, even number, so I’ll stop here...I have to go home and cook pumpkin and roti! 

I'm here!

This is huge, and I don’t even know where to start.  I’M IN GUYANA.  It’s Day 3 of training, and I’m sitting in an air-conditioned hotel room in Georgetown, the capital city and home to 1/3 of the country’s 750,000 people.   We haven’t been out of the hotel at all, except for a brief trip on a minibus to a riverside park for our water safety test.  Immediately we could feel the “fishbowl effect”—though some Guyanese people paid us no mind, others were videotaping us and taking pictures.  This will take some getting used to.

I have to be up in five hours for breakfast, so I don’t have time for a long post, but good news: my training site, St. Cuthbert’s Mission, is classified as remote, but it DOES have internet access, at least during the four hours a day when the village has electricity.  It’s a small Amerindian (that is, Native South American) community of about 300 families where I’ll be learning about Guyanese culture by living with a host family.  During my eight weeks there, I will also have a 9-to-5 schedule of training activities, both in a classroom setting and through hands-on practicum experiences.  I even have homework!

There is so much more to tell about—the awesome people that I’m training with, the delicious food (and constant supply of fresh juice!), the odd exchange rate (my living stipend is 40,000 Guyanese dollars a month, any guesses on how much that is in American money?), and everything I’ve learned from my sessions thus far and my conversations with the current Volunteers who are helping with our training.  However, these are things best discussed at hours other than 2AM, especially since tomorrow is a big day!  We’re moving from the hotel in Georgetown to our training sites, where we’ll meet our host families for the first time.  Expect to hear all about St. Cuthbert’s in my next post!

My Mailing Address

I promised an FAQ's post, but the last week has been crazy and I don't know if I'll have time to write it before I leave.  (TOMORROW!!)  So, here's my mailing address so you can send me letters and other fun stuff!


Kelly Cahill, PCT
Peace Corps
PO Box 101192
Georgetown, Guyana
South America

This is only my address for my first two months in the country. After that I'll move from my training site to my permanent site, and my address will change.  I will post the new one up here as soon as I can.

It takes letters about two weeks to get from the States to Guyana, and about a month for them to get from Guyana to the U.S. So be patient, I will write back! 

Make sure to write "air mail" on the envelope otherwise it will be sent even slower. Other info on mailing stuff through the US postal service is here: http://pe.usps.com/text/Imm/fh_022.htm#ep1403195

Don't send me packages, it will be really, really expensive. If you must send me a package for some reason, you can send it through FedEx, DHL International, etc. instead of the post office, in which case you need to send it to the street address instead of the PO Box. The street address for the Peace Corps is 33A Barrack Street, Kingston, Georgetown, Guyana.


That's all for now I guess, I've still got a lot to do tonight! I'm flying to Philly tomorrow for orientation and my emotions right now are all over the place. Thank you to everyone who has made time to see me these past few weeks, I will miss you all more than I can say.

The situation on the ground with 12 days to go...

I'm in the process of constructing a thorough (and time consuming) "FAQ's" post, but in the meantime, I thought I'd share a few developments.

I finally started packing!  I have 90% of my clothes already packed in one suitcase, and it weighs less than 30 pounds!  I'm glad, because the less my clothes weigh, the more my books can weigh...and the idea of going two years with only a handful of books in my possession is saddening.

Speaking of books, another Peace Corps volunteer recommended an awesome website called  Project Gutenberg.  It's full of free ebooks that you can download for a Kindle or just to read on your laptop.  The catch is, they're all books published before 1923, because the copyright has to expire for free distribution to be legal.  Personally, I'm a fan of books with pages, but I do have those luggage requirements to think about....so this'll certainly do.  I downloaded a dozen books, and I'm especially looking forward to reading Les Misérables and The Wasteland.

Finally, I'm getting involved with a Peace Corps journal project called Snapshots of Service. Two journals will be mailed between 50 Peace Corps volunteers in all different regions, countries, and areas of work, with each volunteer contributing two journal entries over the course of their two years of service.  It'll be awesome to receive that book in the mail and have the opportunity to read about the experiences of other volunteers.  Who knows, it might even get published one day, or at least published as an ebook.  You can read more about the project here.  My bio should be up on that website in a few days!

That's all for now...keep your eyes peeled for my FAQs post, I should be publishing it by the end of the week.   (And if you have burning questions that I should answer in that post, ask 'em! I like comments. Oh, and I like being followed, too. Thank you, followers!)

P.S. I learned how to embed hyperlinks in my blog today!! Coding is fun.

FIRST POST!!!

Look, I have a blog! I never had a Livejournal back in the olden days, so this is new to me.

I was tempted to make my first post entirely about my blog title and my indecisiveness on that front, but there are more pressing issues to discuss.  However, I will say that I almost threw in the towel and called it "naming it is the hardest thing."  If I ever write a novel I will not name it until it is finished, and if I ever have a baby I will just call it "Baby" for the first few weeks.  You have to wait for something to grow a discernible personality before you can give it a name, I think.

Anyway! Back on topic--Peace Corps! I am leaving in eighteen days (eep!) for Guyana, a small country on the northern coast of South America.  Not Guinea. Not Ghana.  And no, they don't speak Spanish--their official language is English!  Their culture has been described as more Caribbean than Latin, and the capital and only large city is Georgetown.   Temperatures range from nighttime lows of around 70 to daytime highs of around 90. Those are the basics--I will blog more specifically about the language (which I find really interesting) and other things as I go along.

Preparation for departure is not too overwhelming yet.  I bought some books, a new camera, a pair of really intense sandals, a Diva cup, a good rain jacket, and some dressy clothes suitable for teaching in 90 degree weather.  I read "Reading for Meaning," which I'd recommend to any elementary ed people out there, and I'm almost finished with "Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle" by Moritz Thomson, which I'd recommend to pretty much anyone reading this blog.  The author served in Ecuador in the '60s, right when the Peace Corps was starting up, and even if this isn't as relevant to your life as it is to mine, he's a damn good writer, and it's interesting stuff.

Still to do: some paperwork to sort out and a LOT of packing...I'm allowed to bring 80 pounds of stuff, which seems reasonable to me.  However, I'm in a facebook group with other Peace Corps Volunteers who are going to Guyana with me, and several of them are already entirely packed and over the weight limit.  Makes me think that maybe I should start packing.

High on my list of to-do's is seeing all my friends and family as much as possible.  I received a lovely surprise this weekend when six of my college friends drove all the way out to Long Island to visit me.  I had a blast, hugged and cuddled and (drank quite a bit) and talked and listened and overall basked in the warm feeling of being surrounded by good friends.  And then they left and I was exhausted from staying up all night, so I took a nap.  And when I woke up the house was dark and quiet for the first time in 24 hours...for the first time in a long time, really, since my brother had just left for college.  It was then that I first felt a loneliness creep up on me, a loneliness that I think will be a common feeling during my Peace Corps service, at least in the beginning.  Don't get me wrong...I'm excited, I'm ECSTATIC, like jumping-up-and-down excited at times, and my heart is entirely set on this.  And, I've left things before.  After high school I left the only home I ever knew, but, quite honestly, it didn't really phase me. Leaving hurts more now, not because I'm afraid of a new culture or poor living conditions or even because of the amount of time I'll be away from home, but because I value the people in my life more than I used to. Realizing that makes me appreciate the loneliness, for what a worse thing to never feel loneliness because I was never close enough with anyone to miss them.

On a lighter note, one final point of interest: I'm training myself to like bananas.  I've never ever liked bananas...once a cross country coach told me that I was probably performing badly because I didn't get enough potassium and I should eat lots of bananas, and I almost cried.  However, yesterday I read in Living Poor about how there were periods of time when the author lived on nothing but bananas for days on end because they were the only thing to eat in his village.  I'm eating a banana right now in preparation, and you know what, it isn't half bad.