Arriving to Peru!: Volunteer Retreat

I made it to Peru and everything has been wonderful so far! We arrived very late on Friday night and were energetically welcomed at the airport by the friendly Peace Corps Peru staff. We then got on a bus with our enormous and very heavy suitcases and were brought to a retreat center where we spent two nights to do some training and introduction type stuff such as: meeting and listening to a speech from the Peace Corps Peru director, learning more about our expectations, how to be safe in Peru and avoid dangerous situations, meeting with our technical trainers and learning more about what we will be doing in our jobs, meeting with the Peace Corps medical staff, having a “survival Spanish” session,  talking about living with our host families, and things like that. We all really enjoyed ourselves at the retreat center because we got to stay in rooms together and spend some more time getting to know each other and as I said before, everyone in my training group is fabulous and we all already feel like family.  Something I realized is that I am the youngest person out of this volunteer group of 46 people.  The average age seems to be 23-26. It is a little bit intimidating because some people have their master’s degrees and everyone seems to have a lot professional experience. I am the only person who literally just graduated from college. Most people have graduated a few years ago and have been doing some kind of awesome job for a few years.  This almost makes me question if I am really qualified to do this job but then I remind myself that the Peace Corps is very competitive to get into and they would not have hired me if they didn’t think I was ready. Basically in addition to having extremely kind and caring hearts, everyone in my volunteer group is really successful, intelligent and hardworking which is really refreshing because it is inspiring to be surrounded by this kind of people. The next ten weeks of training with these wonderful people will be awesome!!

Some people from our group waiting to check in at the airport  in  Wa  DC.

Waiting to board the plane to head to Lima!!

Our arrival at the retreat center in Lima with our many large suitcases

Part of the beautiful retreat center

"Peace Corps" in Spanish