Field Based Training (FBT)

Sunday we are headed out of Siguatepeque to a new town for FBT. The name of the town is Danlí. We will be staying there with a new family for a month while we do more hands on training.

We are definitely excited for the change of pace. Training is not always easy to sit through. There are a lot of “dinamicas” (group activities) where we play games appropriate for 15 year olds while we learn things that are sometimes obvious. I definitely could not imagine us going into service without training, but after five weeks, it is hard to stay enthusiastic. There’s also the stress of not knowing where we will be based. We’ve met a few volunteers now, and have learned that there are great sites and not so great ones. Although we are here to help and be flexible, we wouldn’t mind doing so in a good site. Being a couple also adds to the stress since it is harder to find a place that can fit two different people’s skills. We’ve been a little concerned that we might get placed by the skills of one of us and the other would have to accommodate to whatever else needs to be done in the town, independent of what we can do.

So FBT is definitely something we’re looking forward to. We are taking the bus to Tegucigalpa tomorrow morning at 7:45am and then heading to Danlí from there. The trip can take anything from 4 to 6 hours depending on how many stops the bus makes. Once we get there, we will meet our new host family. We know there are 7 people living there (grandparents, parents, two daughters and a niece), that we get our own room, there’s no hot water in the house, that they have chickens as pets and that their toilet is of the kind that is outside the house and you dump a bucket of water after you use it to flush. We just hope the room is dry and clean so we can get better from our allergies.