Fourth Month, Fourth Week, Third Goal

After three months of training and three weeks of life in my town, I finally decided it would be a good idea (for me at least) to start up a blog to share my Peace Corps experience. Three is an auspicious number after all, and Peace Corps blogging itself grows in part from the third goal of the organization:

1. Provide technical assistance to requesting countries.
2. Promote understanding of US culture on the part of other peoples
3. Promote understanding of other cultures on the part of the folks back at home in the US (presumably, many of ye readers).

So with that, some brief background: I am a sustainable community tourism facilitator in an indigenous Maya-Mam community in the Western highlands of Guatemala, where, ojalla, I will be living and working for the next two years.

What I can tell you so far is that my first three weeks here have not been super-easy. Yet it is a unique privelege to live and work here - despite the social challenges and despite the occasionally intense desire to sprint back into the arms of familiarity (…which may or may not be heavily bearded and have an inexplicably intense interest in anything dealing with the word ‘pyroclastic’ or rhyming with ‘isk’).

So on behalf of the third goal of Peace Corps, and my own personal goal of appreciating and focusing the richness of this experience, I plan to structure the blog with two different types of posts: character portraits and cultural reflections. I suspect we’ll see a lot of overlap, however, since people are largely culture and culture is largely people... a ver! And thanks for reading!