Pre-Service Training - Part II

Howdy!

In my last post we were dropped off in our community, were we would live for the next 2 months 3 weeks of our lives.

San Rafael de Heredia Church

I was assigned to the Fonseca Family, they live in San Rafael de Heredia, I met my new family at the church. An interesting fact about Costa Rican towns is that the center of the town lays a church and a soccer field in front of it. San Rafael is about a 1.5 hour bus to San Jose. (Not because of distance, but because of the twenty plus stops it takes all around the area to pickup and drop people).

When I saw my host mom and sister for the first time I didn't know what to do. So I happily greeted them and kiss them on the cheek. Then we took a taxi to their house with my 150 pounds of luggage. We arrived and was showed around the house, and lastly to my room. I told them I would freshen up and unpack. Some hours passed and they told me to go down for lunch; I was super hungry from the long trip. We talked a bit about the living arrangements (what time they eat there meals, when do they do laundry, etc). I told them if it was ok to go upstairs and keep unpacking, I literally went to sleep around 4-5 PM and didn't wake up until the next day. I was extremely tired from everything, meaning an accumulation from to Staging until Now. It was the first time I could sleep and didn't have to worry about waking up to an activity first thing in the morning. It felt so good.

The schedule of PST goes as follows:

Spanish Training - Gain and/or improve Spanish skills, culture and ethics in Costa Rican culture.
Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays
8 AM - 3:30 PM with an hour lunch.

Peace Corps Training - Theory, Methodologies, Ethics, Safety, Medical, etc...when move to site.
Tuesdays and Thursdays
8 AM - 4:30 PM (sometimes we would leave early or later) with an hour lunch.

This schedule would be for the rest of training. Some days you will do activities in other places, Saturday training (rare), travel to other PCV's sites, Trips to San Jose, etc...Weekends are usually free, 9 times out of 10 you spend them with your host family and go places and enjoy the real Costa Rican way of life.

On my next post I will talk a bit more in depth about what I did while living in San Rafael and a bit about what to expect from training. Thanks for reading.

Cheers!