Monday, November 15, 2010

Oh what up sunshine


Yes, you heard right: rainy season is OVVVVERRRR. I don’t want to jinx it, but considering we haven’t had rain in a week and it’s becoming colder every morning and night, I’m gonna go ahead and jump to the conclusion that we’ll start seeing less landslides. Got a picture of the first frost as well. It’s funny how you can talk for hours about the cold here, even though you can only see your breath until about 9 a.m. and then it becomes “so hot” – as in 80 degrees with zero humidity. I don’t know if it really is how strong the sun is or if it’s being told how white I am every day, but I get burned with a quickness out here.

Also, as you can see in the picture, the tapixca (tah-peeshka) came. Everybody harvested their maiz in the last few weeks, so San Ramón is looking pretty weird these days. You can see for miles, houses pop out of nowhere, and it’s not quite as scary walking through the fields as you can see dogs running at you instead of being surprised at the last second.

So when I first got to site, I was warned by Kate (the PCV who’s been working here for a year) and Adilia (my counterpart) that August, and maybe a little of September, would be really busy. I was excited because this is exactly what I asked for. I figured things would slow down in October and definitely taper off when we got close to the holidays. Turns out I was wrong. So, so wrong. After organizing a district-wide HIV/AIDS training the other week, I ran into the main office near the capital for Reconnect for a few days (trainings, talks, making sure we’re not having mental breakdowns after our first 3 months in site), but have so much work that I couldn’t stick around and take language classes with the rest of my training group. Not sure I’ve stopped running since then…

Why all this work you say? Because we’re putting on THE BEST KIDS CAMP IN HISTORY. Alright, that’s definitely an exaggeration, but how excited these kids and their parents are definitely is evidence of how big a hit it was last year. Kate, along with the help of 6-8 other volunteers, put on a 5-day kids camp that included English classes, art classes, a basketball tournament for girls, and daily themes like Self-Respect, the Environment, and Preventive Health. This year we’ll be doing a lot of the same stuff, with pre-school through 3rd grade in the morning and 4th-6th grade in the afternoon. I’m seriously thinking about stocking up on energy drinks for that week as we already have more than 300 kids signed up. Now comes the fun part: getting funding for snack, materials, and t-shirts for over 300 kids. All before December 6th. Crazier things have happened, right? RIGHT?

Just to make sure we wouldn’t be bored with only one large project on our plate, we have the culmination of our infrastructure project in the next few weeks. Our proposal was approved by USAID a few months ago, but the funds have finally arrived! Now all we have to do is buy all the materials, hand them out to the families, verify that all families with latrines have their hole ready to go and adequately dug, have 3 days of demonstrations on how to build each project, and visit each house to make sure they’ve built their projects within the allotted 2 weeks so I don’t have to go around taking their materials back. All while preparing for the camp. No sweat. I love November.