We have almost completed a month as the new recruits of PBI.  The past weeks have been hectic and intese, full of information, training workshops, new names and faces, and a massive amount of enery and excitement to start working properly.

The four of us, Beltran, Marco, Giuseppe and I from Spain, Italy and the UK went to the week-long training in Valladolid in September and 6 short weeks later we found ourselves on the other side of the world!

After a short period of time in our home countries, enjoying farewell parties with friends and family, we couldn´t wait to put into practice all the theory that we had learnt during the training and throughout the application process which took almost a year.

We had two weeks of training in Bogota that flew by.  We learnt a massive amount with training sessions in the various aspects of the project in Colombia to understand how PBI works, information about the Colombian context and generally understanding how we will be spendig the next 18 months of our lives.  We´ve learnt a lot and now we´re in our teams in the field, we have space to practice what we´ve learnt.

Beltran, Giuseppe and I are in Barrancabermeja with the other members of the team who have welcomed us extremely well into their family!  We definitely feel at home and have had settled into the work we have to do as well as spending time getting to know eachother over some cold beers as we try to get used to the heat of Barranca!

Arriving from Bogota, we spent our first day at a hotel with a swimming pool as a day of rest for the team – the perfect introduction to life in Barranca!  We spent the day chatting, relaxing, watching the suset over the Magdalena river and getting to know the city.

Saying goodbye to our friend Marco after such a long time just the four of us was sad, but he is enjoying the completely different context in Uraba with a team equally attentive to his traning and incorporation into the PBI family.

We are still in training, learning step by step how PBI life works.  Although we have a lot of information to process and learn, with the support of the others on the team, our new friends and role models, I have no doubt that we will be able to do it.  With more responsability each day, we are learning how to take PBI to its new phase!  Hopefully we can do as good a job as the hundreds of volunteers whose footsteps we´re following!

Hannah Matthews