House visits are the awkward, uncomfortable rite of passage for a new Peace Corps volunteer. When a volunteer comes to her new community, her first task is to introduce herself to as many people in the community as possible. Especially in a site with a large population, where one cannot realistically reach all the people within a month or so, it might be helpful to define what one means by 'the community'.
In my case, I start with the political unit of the "canton", sort of like a county in the U.S. Our canton has more than 800 families in it, and 5 subdivisions. Each subdivision is called a "caserio". So I'm hoping to visit a good portion of the families in our caserio, which is the most central, and maybe a few others along the road who are important leaders, and call that 'my community'. That will probably be about 100 house visits, which is awfully ambitious. The cold and wet weather that has come lately has been steadily eroding my ambition to go out door to door...
We've only done about 10 house visits so far, with positive but mixed results. About half the people are super-welcoming and give us tons of info about the community and invite us in, but others don't come outside or only come to the gate and speak little and cautiously in response to our strange accents and forward American manner. The house visits are definitely worth doing, even if it sometimes strikes out. We have met so many people this way, and virtually everyone we visit we see the next day on the street and say hello.
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