Close of Service Conference

This week the volunteers in my training group from May 2009 (so long ago!) attended our final Peace Corps Meeting: the Close of Service Conference. More than anything else, we celebrated that WE MADE IT! We started as 32 people, and now our group is 21. Among the Youth Development volunteers, we were 16 in the beginning, and now we are a mere 8 people!



In a wonderful change from the US$3.50 hostels where we usually stay, Peace Corps put us in a beautiful hotel where we attended three days of meetings. There was time for reflection, resumé preparation, career search, and logistics of all the paperwork we have to complete before we leave in July. We also practiced interview skills; namely, how to talk about our work here without slipping into Spanglish. Quite literally, a conversation between two Peace Corps volunteers sounds like this:

“Yesterday I went to my aldea to teach a charla, and this joven wouldn’t stop molestaring. All of the other kids are so pilas, but he is not.”

“Do you know when the MARPS conference is?”

“Saber. Oh! On the camioneta the ayudante played the loudest banda music. ¡Púchika!”

During the reflection activities, volunteers shared their thoughts on their service. Some people “found themselves,” some people never want to leave Guatemala, others found Guatemalan husbands, and still more want to change the world in a big way. I could really note the changes in some people in my group.


Peace Corps to me was not about self discovery or the idealism of saving the world. I am much more concrete and realistic than that. I had a passion for Latin America and teaching, and this job was a way to do both of those things while helping people who really needed it. I “found myself” before Guatemala, and if anything my work here confirmed what I already knew. However, there were some new changes in me that I didn’t expect: a love (obsession) of cats, passion for cross-stitching, interest and learning about Japan, appreciation of living in nature, and the amount of TV I have watched (to quote my brother: “Kate, I work in television and am in front of TVs all day…but you watch more shows than I do”).



I have two months left to write my reports, to transition work in the schools to the next volunteer, and to get rid of the mounds of stuff I have accumulated. Not to mention that I have to eat my way through the 30 cans of tuna I have stored in case of natural disaster. There is a lot to do, and I’ll be busy! Speaking of which, I have to sign off to grade papers. ¡Adiós!