Site Assignments

After 8 long/short weeks of interviews, speculation and chisme (gossip), we finally got our site assignments of where we’ll be serving for the next two years. The site assignments were based on our requests and where our Water and Sanitation Director felt we would serve best.

We all got together in the main PC office in Surco, a pretty swank neighborhood of Lima that has the prestigious University of Lima, the US Embassy and a full-on mall. We got our site assignment by throwing a spear (no one could find darts) at balloons that had our site assignments in them. Once the trainee popped a balloon, they read off the name and the assignment.

My site assignment….. The Province of Palpa in the Department of Ica. Ica is a coastal department (state) south of Lima that, from what I’ve seen so far, is mostly desert but does have farming communities near the rivers. I’m less than an hour from the Nazca Lines and should have relatively easy access to all parts of the country. It’s far enough from Lima so that I’m not tempted to go into the city every weekend, but close enough that I can go if something fun’s going on there. There will be a number of volunteers within an hour of my site and there is one volunteer about five minutes from me by car which is nice.

The whole time I´ve been here I kind of thought I’d be going to a little department called Tumbes, a rough and tumble department on the coast near the border of Ecuador. When I drew Ica, I was a little surprised and maybe a little disappointed. Now that I’ve looked at a map and have seen how easy it is should be to get to some pretty kick-ass places like Arequipa and Cuzco.

I’m very excited and ready to get to work. We go to Ica this week to do some training and spend some time at our individual sites.