Chone has 75,000 people, so it’s one the biggest sites by far in my training group, since everyone is doing agriculture or natural resources conservation. Like any city here, it’s more dangerous. It’s been notorious for having violent gangs (in the past) and supposedly the most beautiful women in Ecuador. The province of Manabi is expectedly hot and known for having ridiculously fast Spanish and open, friendly people.
Site projects are very fluid with the Peace Corps, but I’m supposed to be primarily working with the city government and potentially a couple other organizations in the areas of tourism and environmental education. Obviously this is still vague, but it will become more clear in coming months. I’m really happy about this work assignment because it looks like it will be more structured. Some assignments leave a lot to the imagination, but I don’t want to be lying in a hammock for 2 years.
Sunday we go on weeklong site visits, so I should have a much better idea of what it’s like very soon. I’ve been told region of La Costa is a whole different world from the Sierra.
Oh, and I’m 1.5 hours from some very nice beaches!
Sounds like a fantastic placement! Great experience for you.
Hola, Reid–Sounds like you have landed in a great place. You talk about the fluid nature of your assignment…in the early days of Peace Corps, most people were community development generalists. Training consisted of something like a boot camp (hard physical exercise interspersed with classroom instruction) somewhere in the US that had a climate roughly equivalent to that of your future posting. But when you got to your post the instructions were typically, “Figure out what you can do to help.” At least you have environmental education and tourism as a focus. Have fun!
Doug