Working on Thanksgiving, and other things I thought I had planned better than I really had.

I call this picture "Please take a picture while I am eating, That makes me happy"

So if it isn't terribly obvious from the title, I really need to learn how to keep things in order, which I do fairly well, but occasionally forget something. When we first got here I was starting to realize that I should make a better agenda for myself and try to actually use it. I went into Excel and made myself an awful monthly calender and started using it, but failed to put any holiday or other important dates on it. The other day the director of the local school asked me to lead a computer class the 19th to the 23rd and it didn't occur to me at any point that would make an overnight trip to celebrate Thanksgiving with other volunteers impossible. So we inquired with our site mate what she would be doing and convinced her it would be no problem at all for her to host Thanksgiving, and she finally decided it could work and organized something close enough to us we could participate. The only problem with said plan is our site mate doesn't have an oven, and even if she did, she is a vegetarian, so I doubt she would love cooking a turkey. Alice and I still live with a host family and we do have an oven, so everything that needed to be baked, Alice offered to cook while I taught class in a village about 20 minutes away. Alice cooked food for 14 people and we still managed to have some left-overs. I turns out people were pretty impressed when we showed up with all that food and it made us mini-celebrities with people, most of whom we had never met. Together Alice and I prepared a turkey, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, and 2 types of stuffing. The other volunteer in the site prepared (in someone else's kitchen) a couple pies, brownies, and a salad. Dinner was great and after dinner we played Thanksgiving trivia which our site mate had made up. It was a blast, which I never expected to find myself saying about a trivia game. Post-trivia, Alice and I decided to call it a night because we were quite tired after cooking all that food and teaching a class, so we left, but festivities raged into the night, when the other volunteers, who won't be here for Christmas this year, decided to celebrate a little early and stayed up until 2 or 3 am singing Christmas Carols. The following day they all went to Teguc for some day after Thanksgiving shopping, despite the fact there are no sales here. They just wanted to carry on the tradition.

Last Saturday I did my first major training with caja rurales (the small bank-like organizations), and everyone tells me it went very well. I don't know how I feel about it, since most of the organizations were doing far better than it had been explained to me I felt I was repeating a lot of information, but everyone gave me good comments on the post training evaluation I did. I think that the difference is before they knew how to do things, and now they understand why a little better. People also worked during lunch and stayed after to do an activity, which from what I have been told is not very common. I had a total of 20 people show up, 14 representing cajas, and another 6 who were there representing the consejo de cuenca, the group that was mostly responsible for me doing the training in the first place. I have follow-ups planned with every community, and I think they all have a little bit more trust in me now. I don't know that I'll be busy with this project everyday for 2 years, but I start doing my new caja training at the first of the year, and that may keep me far busier.

Most of my week last week was dedicated to a computer class, that Alice and I did together. I developed a lesson plan and a set of goals, and Alice assured everyone was doing it right, understood what was going on, and kept people happy. When I volunteered to do the class I had been given an idea of what to expect, but thats not really how it went. The first day, only 4 young ladies showed up, but they were very interesting in the class, and so I proclaimed I would prefer 4 students who cared that 24 who really don't and I agreed to come back the next day. The teacher told me to expect 15 students the following day, and so I prepared, but honestly, found myself shocked when 16 students really showed up. The remainder of the week we worked on a couple of basic microsoft programs, and on Friday about 12 of them came to our office for an internet basics class. The students purchased Alice and I gifts and presented them to us. This was both shocking and awesome. They bought Alice a nice little purse and keychain and bought me a soviegneers notepad, and the coolest pen ever. The odd thing was it didn't feel forced. i know as students the idea was probably someone elses, but they all seemed happy to give up the gifts and thank us. I think its because we tried our best to be patient, and focused more on things they wanted to learn, as opposed to just teaching whatever we felt like.