Reconnect

The first week in April we had “Reconnect” with Peace Corps – an opportunity to get back together with everyone in our training group at the Peace Corps office after being in our sites for four months. It was a nice opportunity to check in and hear how things are going in everybody’s site, share accomplishments, commiserate with common frustrations, receive technical training, and have Spanish classes. We had some interesting sessions on cultural adjustment too where we talked about our frustrations and strategies to combat them.

We stayed in Antigua all week so despite the fact that we were in classes or trainings all day long, it was like a mini-vacation. We stayed most of us together at a hostel that despite the dirty shared bathrooms, had a great terrace for hanging out on in the evenings. We ate really yummy Antigua food and went out salsa dancing. I got a chance to stock up on needed items like peanut butter and shampoo and internet time. It was really interesting to hear the projects that other people are working on from trash collection to opening libraries. Some people have very challenging sites and their biggest accomplishment was “I’m still here” which is a big accomplishment because we still have all 33 in our group that we started with back in Washington DC in August. Most groups lose at least a couple people by this point. Way to go guys!

It was hard to say goodbye to my fellow volunteer friends not knowing when the next time I’ll see them will be but it was nice to come back to El Chol after being gone for a week. Everyone greeted me warmly and told me they had missed me, which was nice to hear. I didn’t miss much around the office while I was gone. Everything was normal when I came back…the mayor is never in the office because he’s studying criminology in the capital, the secretary is smoking in his office and listening to marimba music, (like a xylophone) while he handwrites documents into big dusty books, and my coworkers are all glued to their computers, some working intently and others playing solitaire. They have been busy putting together project profiles and preliminary engineering studies for all the infrastructure projects planned for next year, which doesn’t have a lot to do with me. Right now they are still finishing up projects from 2006 and 2007, haven’t started the 2008 projects yet and are already planning for 2009. That’s how it goes.

I went to La Cienega this week, walking an hour each way, with the intention of making corn bread, but when I got there it turned out there was meeting planned at the same time to form the school committee. You never really know what’s going to happen when you show up to a community. The women felt really bad but I told them that it was much more important that they go to that meeting than make bread so I went along to the meeting with them. Basically, in order to receive any kind of additional funding, there has to be an official organized group of parents and teachers with a president, secretary, treasurer, etc. in order to receive funds. So they formed the group and are hoping to get funding to fix the broken windows, paint the school, and participate in the Glass of Milk program to get milk donated to the kids. It’s a very formal process with an official book of “actas” which are like meeting notes, but written in a very formal way. Everyone present has to sign and those who can’t write their name put their fingerprint. It was good to meet the teachers and more people from the community and I played soccer with the kids (all of 15 of them that attend the school) for awhile.

My English class is going well. We didn’t have class for two weeks this month, first for Semana Santa and then for Reconnect so we’ve had to do a lot of review. This week I wrote out the lyrics to Green Day’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams and we used it as a listening comprehension exercise. By the end they were all singing along and it was really cute.

The heat this week has been almost unbearable. We used to have the luxury of air conditioning at the office but it broke and now we all just sit there sweating without moving. In the middle of the day my house turns into an over as the tin roof heats everything up. Supposedly it will only last like this for a few more weeks and then the rains will start. It’s been raining occasionally at night so loud on the tin roof that you can’t hear yourself think. Yesterday it rained really hard in the afternoon for the first time and there was a double rainbow perfectly framing the church in the central park. The heat is the main topic of conversation with anyone. When you go buy something at the store, you talk about the heat. When you greet anyone in the street, you talk about the street. When you talk to anyone, at work or at home, you start off by talking about the heat. Every conversation goes something like this:

“Good morning!”
“Good morning! A pleasure to greet you.”
“What heat!”
“Yes, what heat!”
“Too much…”
“Yes, too much.”
“It looked like it wanted to rain”
“Yes, it looked like it wanted to rain.”
“Only God knows when the heat will subside.”
“Yes, that’s how it is.”