Site Anxiety

Do you remember Christmas eve when you were 7 or 8 years old? Perhaps you asked Santa for a bike as your Christmas present, and were feeling anxious, wondering if you would get it or not. The truth is you probably don’t remember the feeling… neither did we until the last two weeks as we have anxiously been awaiting finding out where we are going to spend the next two years of our life.

We have spent the last two and a half months training for the moment when we get to become volunteers and go to our site. We’ve wanted to make plans and have dreams about it, but it has been difficult because we don’t even know where we’ll be going or what we’ll be doing. But it all ends this afternoon. Like a kid the night before Christmas, Max and I are pacing around anxiously, wishing we could fast forward time. Let me tell you a little more about how site assignment works and why it is such a mystery to this day.

We are both assigned to the Peace Corps business project in Honduras and our project manager, Edel Perez, decides where each aspirante is assigned to. In Honduras, the biz project is focused on four major areas of work: Micro-Enterprises, IT & Computer Education, Micro-Financing and Tourism. Each volunteer is assigned to focus in one of those areas in their site, and is assigned a counterpart that they will work with during their two years of service. There’re also different kinds of sites volunteers can be assigned to: small rural communities with no electric power, aldeas with a few thousand people with most basic amenities but hours away from the closest city, places with other volunteers close to you or with no one for hours, sites with great weather or places hotter than anything you’ve experienced. All these options mean you could end up in a great place with a lot of friendly people and great work to do or something very different from that. Considering we will be spending two years of our lives wherever we get assigned, the whole process is very stressful.

What we’d like to do
During our interviews, Max and I have expressed what kind of work we would like to do, and have been open about everything else (amenities, close or far, hot or cold). We both would like to do tourism (we think it would be something new and fun). I also said I would like to work with small enterprises, perhaps owned by women, and help them grow their businesses (like what I had been doing in El Provenir with the pottery women) and Max said he would also like to do IT (create web pages, help setup networks, etc.)

What we are really excited about
During our first week here, we met a 2nd year volunteer working on a tourism project in the north coast of Honduras. The project is mainly to help preserve the coral reefs around a set of small keys off the north coast, and he recently got a significant grant from US Aid to fund the project. The end goal is to protect the reef, while helping the people of the surrounding areas learn how to leverage it for income generation through tourism. That sounded like a great, fun project and the city where he lives is a place full of culture and fun. We also learned that he is almost done with his two years of service and is considering whether to extend, or let a new volunteer take over.

Of course Max and I are in love with the project and would love to live in that city… and so do a lot other people in the group. We are not even sure if the volunteer decided to extend his stay, or the site will be open for one of us.

This assignment would be one of the biggest projects in PC Honduras, and in one of the best locations. The volunteer assigned to it is older than us, and had had a lot of work experience before joining the PC. That makes it a very competitive spot, and an important decision for the project manager to decide who goes there next.

The clues
None of us knows for sure what the sites are, but we have all been trying hard to find some clues. For Max and I, the focus has mostly been trying to confirm if THE site is really an option or not. Every time a current volunteer has visited we’ve gotten some clues about possible sites near them and we’ve compiled a list of about 15 possible sites (there’s only 11 of us), but it is all pure speculation. We have even started a betting pool with all the possible sites and where we think everyone is going… whoever gets the most points will win about 100 Lempiras.

About the site we want, we haven’t been able to learn much. Most volunteers we've asked say they are not sure if it is opening or not and even if it was opening there’s no way we can know if it would be us getting it or someone else. We are still hopeful though, and we think that if the site is opening we might be the ones to get it...

The End
Not really… it won’t be until today at 2:30pm when the official site announcement meeting begins. Max and I are excited and terrified, but we also know that in the end it doesn’t really matter… we will work hard wherever we are and we will have a good time with whatever we end up working on.