Our Unsurprising Site

Week 8
10/11/09 - 10/18/09

Week 7 and Week 8 really ran together since I was gone for part of both. After the street immersion in Manila, the CYF trainees met up with the rest of the Luzon trainees in Education and Coastal Resource Management (CRM) for the Supervisor's Conference in Cavite.

Supervisor's Conference is exciting for all the trainees because on the first night, we get to find out what our permanent site is going to be. Also, as the name implies, we get to meet our supervisors for our permanent site. For Jessie and I, a lot of the excitement was deflated by the fact that we were already pretty sure where we were going to be. We ended up being right.

A lot of hints had been dropped throughout training that our permanent sites were going to be the same as our respective training sites. There is nothing inherently wrong with either of our sites. In fact, our training sites are awesome. The town we are living in is awesome. Our host family is awesome. BUT, when everyone else is finding out about their cool new regions and new work sites...when they go to visit their site and get a parade and see new sights...it is really easy to be jealous. We weren't jealous of their specific sites, we were jealous of the new experiences that they had that we don't get.

This was a couple weeks ago, though. Now, that jealousy has faded. We are excited about staying here. We are excited that we don't have to pack up our lives again and haul them off to a new place. We are excited that we don't have to wonder whether or not we will get along with our new host family. We are content. And, now we have all these new places that we can visit where are friends are!

So, that was Supervisor's Conference. Not exciting for us, but great for everyone else.

It was great seeing all of the other trainees who we haven't seen since Initial Orientation. We will get to see them again when we swear in too. More places to go visit!

Alright, I am almost caught up with the weeks. Boring week 9 to come soon!

Until then...Pis Out (ps - "Pis" = phonetic spelling of "Peace" in Philippines)