Our sites!

We were suprised to learn that we are going to a coastal city. Marguerite will be in Santa Elena, and I will be in La Libertad, the next town west from Santa Elena. The province is also called Santa Elena. If you are looking at an old fashioned map, find Guayaquil, which is the biggest city in Ecuador, and it's a port city. If you look due west, you will see a small peninsula. Our towns are nestled in the base of that peninsula.

High temparatures hover around 85 year round. When I added it to my Weather.com, Jefferson and Santa Elena were both reporting 86. (Santa Elena will presumably be in the 80's on New Years, too.) Surprisingly, it is supposed to be a semi-arid climate. Because of the low altitude, we will have to take malaria drugs while we are there.

Marguerite will be working with a group called Plan Internacional. They want her to work in areas such as teen pregnancy, HIV, gender equality, and human rights in general.

I'm assigned to a school in La Libertad called Escuela Gustavo Enrique Galindo Velasco. I think it's a public school. I'm expected to do some life skills training, enlarge the after school tutoring program, promote reading and literacy, and train the teachers to expand their abilities with things like computer classes, financial literacy, and English.

We have been assigned to a host family, but we don't know where the house is in relation to our two worksites. There is already a Volunteer at my site, and we have been given his name and email address. We will soon be flooding him with questions.

Incidentally, we got our assignments much earlier than other classes. The thinking was to remove the uncertainty, and let us shape our learning with our geography and job descriptions in mind.

They also had the neatest little ceremony for us. Out behind the school, they had created a map of Ecuador with a sign for each province, with flower petals delineating the boundaries. They then read off each name with the town and province and we went to stand in the province to which we were assigned. It was a great way to learn which of our classmates would be near us, and where everyone was being sent. That was a real class act.