Just when you think you’ve gotten used to things . . .

We’ve nearly made it through the eleven weeks of Peace Corps training. These last two and half months have entailed sitting through forty hours of class every week, trying our hands at a variety of sanitation and water projects and mastering spinach. We’ve traveled through the vast plains of the altiplano, down into the green, green jungles of the Amazon basin, and through the rolling hills of the Andes’ valleys. We’ve lived with an amazing Bolivian family who share their meals and laughs and safe, welcoming home with us. We’ve found some incredible friends within our training group, spent countless hours in each others’ company, and have gotten used to being packed in eight to a car. We’ve missed family and friends and familiar things back home. And we’ve found things here to replace the numb feeling of homesickness.

It has been a time of reflection, absorption, and adjustment. I’m just about accustomed to the schedule, the life, the food, the faces, the language, the dog-filled neighborhood, and, for sure, the good company of the friends we’ve made here in Cochabamba. Just in time for another change. In a week we’ll be heading to Okinawa, Bolivia where we’ll make our home and do the good work we came to do for the next two years. Last night I was talking to my host mama about how hard it is to leave the things you’ve gotten used to, and she said, ‘yeah, imagine how it will feel in two years when you have to go back home.’