Okay...so I arrived in Mexico late last Thursday. I was met at the airport by Dan, a volunteer whose year overlaps mine, and Arturo, one of the NPH staffers. After a crazy ride through Mexico City where we consistently missed other vehicles by inches, I arrived a little flustered to NPH´s Cuernavaca house. Dan helped me carry my bags in and suddenly I was standing in a brightly lit room staring at (and being stared at by) the other new female volunteers.
Wesleigh is from Washington state. She hadn´t taken Spanish since freshman year of high school, but decided NPH was the place for her. She´s taken a month of Spanish classes and is doing really well. I know she´s still very self-concious about her language skills, but we are all very impressed with how far she´s come in such a short time and her bravery in taking on a second language so completely. Monika is from Germany and one of the sweetest people I´ve ever met. Spanish is her third langage after German and English. She´s really self-concious about her English which is required in German schools and has some difficulty understanding our American accents especially since she was taught Bristish English. She´s a lot better than she thinks and I was shocked to learn today that it had actually been five years since she´d used her English. Martina, or Marty for short, is from Austria. I´m not sure what number Spanish is for her. She seems to know a lot about languages in general. Marty is quite the world traveler. She was a volunteer at the World Cup in South Africa and has been all around Europe. Marty was so determined to make it to Latin America that she dedicated the past two years to studying Spanish. She will be working as a librarian. Monika will be an encargada like me as well as a teacher for the special education students and Wesleigh is an encargada too. We have one other female volunteer who will be with us, but she is an old volunteer like Dan and has been at Miacatlan the whole time I´ve been in Cuernavaca so I´ll have to tell you more about her later.
The boys are pretty awesome as well. Andrew is from the DC area and graduated from Notre Dame last May. He was a Spanish major like me and studied abroad in Mexico one semester so the language part is more natural for him. He´s also just a very easy guy to be around and makes you feel immediately comfortable. Ignacio is from Holland and really funnz. He´s about six foot five, really thin, and very fair. Needless to say, he sticks out. Ignacio, or Iggie as he is sometimes fondly called, is really popular with the ladies and very blunt in what he says. Iggie does not hold back his thoughts which causes a lot of entertainment for the rest of us. Andrew and Ignacio are the only new male volunteers. Dan, who picked me up at the airport, is actually good friends with Andrew from their study abroad program and school. I haven´t seen him much since he´s been mostly in Miacatlan, but he works in the clinic and hopes to apply to med school someday. Jeremy is the last male volunteer. A cerified physical therapist, he volunteered for six months with NPH, took six months back in the States, and plans on spending another six months here. I´ve only briefly met him.
Things have been going pretty well. We all laugh a lot which is a really good sign about the year to come and we´re all extremely excited about the work ahead. The first few days for me were not very structured. Since I arrived so late in the week, I skipped class on Friday to sleep in and get my head on a little straighter. That afternoon I helped translate letters for the padrinos office and we all went out for a night on the town which was a lot of fun. Saturday was spent exploring Cuernavaca in the day time and we watched She´s the Man on my computer that night. Talk about making me feel right at home! ;-) Sunday was mass at the cathedral, running some errands that involved a lot of walking, and heading over to Tepotzlan. Tepotzlan is a smaller town located not very far from here where a Mayan temple is hidden at the top of a mountain. Desafortunadamente, we were unable to actually see the temple. The site had already exceeded it´s max of visitors for the day. Instead we wandered the streets of town eating and shopping at the local market before heading back to Cuernavaca.
This week I´ve actually been attending Spanish class. We have about a forty minute bus ride to the school, which all the new volunteers have to attend, so we leave our house about 8am and arrive in time for class to start about 9am. Classes are very small. I´m in a class of four with Monika, Wesleigh, and another Monika from Fiji and our class is the largest in the school. First we have grammatica with one teacher, a twenty minute break, and a second class of conversation. The day ends about 1pm and we head back to the house for lunch with the high schools students here at 2pm. Lunch is served in a cafeteria located in the basement of one of the buildings. Before you walk in, you grab a cup, spoon, and shallow bowl from a table outside. These are your only utensils. Inside immediately opposite the entrance is a counter which seperates the kitchen from the cafeteria and where the food is set up in a largely self-serve capacity. Long, metal tables with benches provide seating. After you eat, you have to wash you dishes at the sinks in the corner and return them to the table outside. The system is great in theory, but not so effective when the water goes out which has happened the last couple of times I´ve eaten there. Lunch is the biggest meal of the day and dinner not until 8pm. The afternoon is largely spent doing homework, reading, snacking, and generally hanging out. Because of all the snacking, dinner isn´t an extremely popular option. So far, I´ve only been once.
Well, this is my life here so far. The NPH set up here is very interesting. We´re living in the compound which houses the international director of NPH. The cafeteria is located down the street in a much larger area which holds the dormitories for the high school students, the offices, and the housing for the volunteers located here as well as the NPH Mexico director. What else? I guess if you have questions, just ask. I feel like this entry is way too long as it is. I only have two more days of class and then Monday we´ll actually move to the Miacatlan house. Okay, signing off now. More entries soon! Love you all.
