Hello! I know it´s been a while, so I figured I
would send out another update. Things
are still going really well, now that I have my own house and don´t feel quite
so much pressure to be busy every second of the day. I still don´t have a cat (hopefully next
week), but I have adopted my neighbors dogs, and two of my host family´s
dogs. At any point in time, I have at
least one dog following me around – to school, to run, to random events – but
one of the dogs, Mop (pronounced Mope), has my heart. I have taught him to sit, and we are
currently working on stay. He hangs out
at my house when I am not there and greets me when I arrive. At night he sleeps under my window outside and
barks at anything that comes near. And
in general, he´s just a really sweet dog.
I love him very much! I am going
to buy him flea shampoo soon.
Things are also going well with
my service. My activities and projects
are evolving slowly. I go to the school
three times a week to help with agriculture class, and starting next week I
will be giving an hour or so of environmental education to 4 of the 6
grades. I had my first youth fun time –
I brought Uno and invited all the kids to play in the community house after
school (15 came! That´s a lot.) The First Lady´s Dispatch is working in the
community teaching people how to have organic gardens by their house (although
almost everyone makes a living here through agriculture, very few people grow
or eat vegetables) and I have been supporting this project and learning for my
own garden. I am also working with a new
women´s group that wants to start a bakery, and my group of men who make
organic compost want to start a community vegetable garden. And I am going to try to work more with the
local cooperative, though that is still uncertain. I am planning on having another meeting with
the community to see which of the projects mentioned in the last meeting they
want to work on most. I´m hoping that
once I get those projects started, I will feel better.
For now, I still feel like I am
in limbo. I still say that I have two
years left, but really it´s more like one and a half, and that makes me feel
frantic. Time keeps flying by, and I
still haven´t done a dozen things I want to do.
I know I am the first volunteer here, so I am not expected to move
mountains or anything, but I want to move mountains. And two years is really not enough. All the other volunteers say that the first
year is practice. You experiment with
different activities, different levels of participation, different projects,
and by the second year you really have your groove down. You know what you want to do and what the
community will do with you. So I have
about seven more months to experiment with stuff, and figure out how much I
want to be in the school, in the different community groups. One thing I have learned here is
patience. I have learned how to feel
things out, watch ideas and activities evolve, and to nudge them in the desired
direction.
For now, I am still enjoying my
time with the people here. They have a
great sense of humor and are so generous.
I continue to receive gifts of eggs, yucca, plantains, cucumbers and
fruit. And now that I have my own house,
people have started to visit me, so I give them coffee, juice and cookies. Despite the bouts of homesickness I still
feel for cafés, good pizza, brownies, and a night life, the people here make it
so that I never really want to go home.
For now, my home is here.
