FBT Week 1

So we are in Field Based Training now and we are seperated. I am in a fairly large town with lots of stores and 3 internet cafes! Kev´s town is extremely small with only 28 houses and he does not even have electricity or indoor plumbing! Neither of our houses are as nice as our first one but they could be worse. Kev has 6 kids and 2 grandkids in his family so hopefully his Spanish is improving. We will be at these sites for the next 5 weeks and training has become more intense. A lot of it is in Spanish so hopefully our Spanish will improve too. I think it has already been helpful being seperated because we cannot talk to each other in English every night. My host mother is a political activist and that has already been interesting. The first night she took me to the liberal party headquarters where there were tons of people all wearing red and yelling ¨viva al partido liberal¨. We also went to the national persons registry which was open until 2 AM because it was the last day for people to get IDs in order to be able to vote in the internal elections in November. People are very into politics here, last night every local station had only political programs on. The day we arrived at FBT the community had planned a welcome party for us but it did not happen due to politics and clashing ideals. Very interesting. I have a host sister who is 9 and loves to talk to me...good for my Spanish. I also have 2 host brothers who are 15 and 19 and rarely around. My host dad is a truck driver and only lives with us on the weekends. They are a nice family so far and haven´t made me eat meat (although my mom looked at me like I was an alien when I told her I was a vegitarian). Meat is a luxory here so people do not understand that someone would choose not to eat it. I´ve been a little sick to my stomach the past few days but I think I am getting better... I was able to go running today with some other girls in my project and that was fabulous! It was so nice to exercise. Tonight we have more training until 8 PM...we are learning all about violence in Spanish so that should be interesting.