I know it's been awhile!

Weeks have been going by so fast here!  In one week I find out where my permanent site will be!!!! I’m really excited to know what my job will be and the location of it for the next two years.  What I have been doing now is training, so I’m not an actual Peace Corps Volunteer yet.  Our graduation or swearing in will be at the US Embassy in Manila on September 18^th.  Which I believe will be video recorded so you all will be able to see it!!!

As I said previously there were about 72 of us who arrived in the Philippines, 2 have went home.  Now there are 70, which are separated into three different sectors: Children, Youth and Family(CYF), Coastal Resource Management (CRM), and Education. There are I think 26 people in the same sector as I am, which is CYF.   We are divided into three groups living within three different locations about an hour or less apart from each other.  Each group has been doing the same things in our communities and every week all 26 of us come together and discuss what difficulties and successes we had facilitating meetings in the previous weeks.  Basically we are able to learn techniques on how to facilitate programs, because we will be doing similar things as a volunteer.

So far we’ve helped to develop a community project with community members, letting the community decide what they want to add to their community by using PACA.  PACA is a Community Development tool that focuses on conducting activities with different groups that make up a community (ex. boys and girls, age groups, teachers and supervisors) and then bringing the groups together to analyze resources they have to create an action plan. 

Activities are designed to help community members explore ways and analyze their own situation.  The community identifies its own resources and strengths that it possesses so that it can draw upon them in order to reach a goal. PACA also helps build a sense of community contentedness and pride within its members as they process information, analyze the implications for the community, and plan for action.

This process was started when we arrived and has been ongoing.  We have had our ups and downs in our group, but our community members decided that they would like to build a public community library.  So our group is all very excited to see how the process will go while we are here, but because we are only here for a short time for training we won’t be able to see the actually building.  I hope that the community will continue with the project and see it through until the end

The other project we have been doing, which was just started yesterday, is life skills youth camp!  I taught two 2 hours sessions to 10 youth in my community about a life skill.  I picked nutrition.  It made me a little nervous, but the kids love us here so I had a lot of fun!


So many great things to see here and I've only been in one province!  This is a view from Mt. Samat in the province of Bataan: