Vamos A Ver: IST

So happy to see Luna again!

Since I had to head to San Jose for IST, I took the opportunity to head in a few days earlier to visit two volunteers in Copey (about 2 hours outside of San Jose) & to visit my training host family. It was great to be in Copey and see another site (that is coldddddddd, so jealous) and catch up with friends. Also great, being back with my training host family. I loved that it was such a big deal that I was there visiting, but at the same time, it wasn’t. I was greeted by giant hugs and fresh baked pastries as we sat around the breakfast bar having cafecito and catching up. The new volunteer who is staying there came back later that night and it was great to get to know him and hear how training was going (while being so thankful that that chapter of my PC experience is over). The night ended with watching the Proposal in Spanish with my host brother & sister and it just felt great to be back at my second home. The next day I hung around watching tv and using their internet

I missed this...so much.

while Spanish class was going on for the newbies. I got to catch up with

my old Spanish teacher & after an amazing lunch (I think I almost forgot

how good a cook my host mom was) it was off to San Jose for IST.

In Service Training (IST) is a week when you get back together with your training group after being in site for 3 months for basically, some more training. We had 2 more Spanish classes, a medical session mainly about dengue, a safety & security session, a talk about resiliency and we all presented our CASAs which was basically this project that we had all been “working on for the 3 months in site” where we collected information about our site such as population, social concerns, organizational structure, etc. Basically it boiled down to a slideshow of pictures of everyone’s sites and it was super interesting to see where everyone is living these days.

IST was held at a fantastic hotel in San Jose that had comfortable beds, hot water, AND air-conditioning. Those luxurious amenities plus my Tico 25 family made it quite a great week. After the sessions we usually splurged on delicious food like hamburgers with actual Heinz ketchup (trust me, you’d miss it too if you didn’t have it) & we even found a pizza place with buffalo chicken pizza, so of course I was on cloud nine. The week cumulated in VACTail when we welcomed the new group of trainees, Tico 26, and I must say I had much more fun than at our VACTail since this time around I actually knew most of the PCVs there and it was a great opportunity to catch up with friends from the southern part of the country and ones I just generally don’t get a chance to see.