I finished my service less than a year ago, and I'd say that there were definitely fun aspects to it! I enjoyed meeting new people, learning Spanish, and walking places in my site, and visiting NGOs.

Yes, there were difficult times, mostly getting sick in site. I got pulled into some drama at the local headquarters. A lot of trainees and volunteers were administratively separated for breaking security rules, some fortunately stayed in country and continued with their lives and work, and of course this was during the 2016 election which I really wasn't cognizant of during the time, and there was a lot of tension and just weird things happening all the time at the local headquarters.

Obama was in the White House when I left for service and we even did Staging in Washington D.C., which I know that it is crazy to say that that helped me with my service, but I really think it did. I walked around the National Mall, walked to the White House, it was a patriotic/inspirational send off.

Definitely I feel like I learned a lot, I feel that I contributed in positive ways for the community where I served, though I feel like I had a lot of support from local actors in my community and even NGOs, resources are limited, did I use these resources wisely? Was I right to beg NGOs to work with me? Hopefully so, I'd like to go back and see how things are going, not so much to see if I had a big impact (maybe I'd find that out), but just to see how things change.

I had a high motivation going in (not necessarily high expectations), I wanted to work on a zillion projects, and I did get to do a lot of stuff, but of course with 20/20 hindsight I wished I worked even harder and extended for 4 months, but hindsight is perfect. I could have learned the local Mayan language a lot better, there were issues with selecting a local tutor and even some drama with the local hq regarding that.

Crazy things happen, one week I was low on supplies, and/or just bummed out with eating beans and oatmeal, bananas and nuts, but I was doing it. I think I might have missed market day, and I didn't have a lot of fruits, though often there were apples and stuff available in town, and this guy on motorcycle who came from 2 hours away from the big city was selling pizza at my host house just when I happened to come home for lunch for no reason . . . so I had pizza in my site, which didn't happen, maybe once a year around ferria there would something that wanted to be pizza, but it was great and so unexpected. Weirdly surprising.