And here we are again...again.

It's happened.  Peace Corps has dropped the bomb that I've been dreading for the past year.  My training class of volunteers are being forced to end our service by March 24, four months before we were scheduled to (I'm mentally exhausted to the point I'm ending sentences with prepositions).  I now have two months to pack up my life, say goodbye to an entire chapter of my life, a community of people I've grown to love, and a way of life that I've come to call my own.

Peace Corps sent us an email yesterday notifying us of "specific initiatives to ensure, to the maximum extent possible, that Volunteers serving in Guatemala will do so as safely as possible.  This will result in a reduction in the overall size of our program in Guatemala and the method and manner in which we conduct our operations...Peace Corps Guatemala has made the decision to consolidate operations in the Central Western Highlands.  This will allow us to implement a new transportation policy, and will also allow us to provide greater support and services to our volunteers in this area."

"The new COS date for our March, 2012 group is Feb. 25, 2012.  The new COS date for our July, 2012 training group is March 24, 2012.  All volunteers in these groups will be granted early COS…Volunteers who currently work outside of [the Western Highlands] geographic area may be relocated to existing sites in the Central Western Highlands to the extent that they are available, or they may be granted early COS."

So there it is.  One line in a PDF email attachment.  That's apparently what 24 months of service has earned me.  An email attachment.  We've been summoned to an all-volunteer conference this coming week to discuss these changes in detail.

I find myself in a state of shock, of emotional numbness, that makes it impossible for me to even begin to explain what I think of these new "specific initiatives."  All I can think about is how incredibly unfair this is to the dozens of communities and hundreds of Guatemalans who will be abandoned, punished once again for things far out of their hands.  And how unfair this is to us as volunteers who come here as willing, able adults who fully understand the risks involved in oversees service work (see "The Peace Corps kids are alright").  24 months of service and I haven't even earned the decency of a phone call.  Of some compromise, in the least.

Today I will wash my clothes in the pila, call my counterparts, and start packing up my life, piece by piece.  I'll do all of these things on my own, of course, because that's how it works.  As volunteers we're left to fend for ourselves on a daily basis.  We're left to make the daily decisions of how to spend our time, who to work with and who to ignore, how to get by on a measly volunteer stipend, how to keep ourselves mentally sane after months in site.  These things we're left to figure out on our own, and generally speaking, we do a pretty damn good job at it.  But when it comes to important decisions, the ones that affect the very core of our lives here, those are made for us.  Now where's the sense in that?