Headed East

[City street at our permanent site]

10.4.2009

One of the biggest moments in the life of a Peace Corps Trainee is Site Announcement – when you find out where you’ll be living and working for the two years of service. We gave our preferences for site early on, but ultimately the decision is made by PC staff and is pretty much luck of the draw.

We were really happy with the announcement of our permanent site though – we’ll be going to the southern tip of Eastern Samar, a largely undeveloped area noted for its pristine coast and potential ecotourism spots. We’ve heard that aside from Mindanao, Samar is the poorest region of the Philippines, and Peace Corps volunteers haven’t been on the island for some time.

We will be the first group of Coastal Resource Management volunteers in Samar and Brandon and I (along with our sitemate, Eric) will be the first ever PC volunteers in our community. For a program that’s had 268 batches of volunteers, getting a site that’s never hosted Peace Corps before is a big deal.

[View of Leyte Gulf, from our new home]

We spent three days at a conference on Leyte, meeting our new supervisor and learning about our site workplans. I will be working at the Municipal Investment, Environment, and Tourism Office and Brandon is assigned to the Municipal Planning and Development Office. Both are housed in the municipal building, but we’ll have separate offices, just across the hall from each other.

The bulk of my work will be in ecotourism development and working with micro-entrepreneurs on livelihood projects. Brandon will be concentrating on solid waste management, marine biophysical assessments, and marine protected areas (MPAs). This seems to be a good match for both our skills and interests.

After the conference we traveled to our site. The trip only takes three hours from the nearest large city, Tacloban, and most of the drive is along the Samar coast. People from Leyte have been warning us that Samar is a mystical place, full of witches and poison – but people are always afraid of the unknown and we didn’t find any of those there. Our current host sister actually told us that she only eats Ramen noodles and other packed food when traveling in Samar, (because of the witches with poison), but we ate the food and have survived so far!

[Outside our new home]

At our new site we will live with another host family for at least three months. On this trip we stayed with our future family, which again consists of one little old lady, who again, was incredibly kind to us. Nanay #2 runs a boarding house for street vendors, which is located directly behind her main house. We will live upstairs in the main house, in a spacious bedroom overlooking the Leyte Gulf.

There’s so much to tell about our wonderful visit to Eastern Samar. We’ll post another entry soon with more details and pictures from the trip.

[This is where we will LIVE]