Pre-Service Training - Part III

Howdy!

Hope everyone had a good weekend. Today I will write about a  usual week in PST. Like I mentioned before PST consisted of this two activities:

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.

Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays

I would typically wake up at 6:45 AM and have breakfast and walk about a mile and meet my group in the "salon comunal" by 8:00 AM, it's a usually a classroom within the church's premises, were we would meet up with our Spanish facilitator and did several Spanish activities. For example: interviewing business and people, vocabulary, "dichos" (slang), day trips, etc. This part of training really gives you the confidence to go out there and talk to people. I honestly thought before coming to Peace Corps I would be shipped to a site and would start working on a project. But first part of the process is gaining the communities Trust. The day would end up at around 3:00-3:30 PM, my classmates and I would usually walk around our community, eat a snack; usually french fries and just talk about our day and our plans in the future. 

Tuesdays and Thursdays

San Isidro de Heredia Church

These days I would typically wake up at 5:30 AM, I would get ready, sometimes if I had time I would have some breakfast and be at the bus stop to San José at 6:15 AM. It would usually takes us around 1-1.5 hours to get to San José (its only 7 miles away, but would make around 20 stops or so). We would arrive at 7:30 AM or so and we get some coffee for a few minutes at a coffee/bakery shop called "La Colombiana" and walk to the FOV which is the Federación de Organizaciones Voluntarios, which is a place were volunteer organizations can use for activities such as teaching, presentations, events, etc. In other words, it's a bunch of classrooms. We would be there till 4:00-4:30 PM learning about safety, medical, methodologies, ethics, and many more subjects and leave back home. We would take a bus and one out of two times we would hang out in San Isidro de Heredia which is the community in the middle from were all the PCV resided. We would usually have some good food and drinks.

This went on for about three months, until we finally finished PST and went on to our Swear-In Ceremony. I will talk about that in my next post. Thank for reading.

Cheers!