Back to the blog

I am attempting to revive my blogging spirit after a month away. I wish I could better explain my absence, but unless you get my e-mails, I really can’t explain it without making a bad situation worse. I can only imagine what the involved parties would say if they had hard copies of my opinion. I now understand why before we are even in country the Peace Corps starts to tell us not to tell about some topics publicly.
I don’t have a lot to say about my work of late, since I am keeping up on projects I started and explained a while ago. Some communities are hard to keep up with than others, but I try to make contact with everyone regularly, and they seem to be happy knowing that I will follow-up on my own. Volunteer organizations don’t usually stay for two years, so it is taking some time for them to adjust to me.
I have recently trained one new micro-finance group (caja rural) and I get to train another one this month. I did 5 days worth of training in 2 days, which ended up being surprisingly short. This makes me nervous, but I feel like the training resources that had been developed before me were long and wordy. I almost feel like the organization that designed the training want it to take 10 days to better justify why they were getting paid so much to give the trainings. Being able to follow-up with them will make help me improve my training, since I will know what I did a good and bad job training.
This month was reconnect which is a meeting we have within our project groups 3 months after training. The nice part was the food; the bad part is there really is not a lot to do there. Lately, Peace Corps staff has relied more on our site, Valle de Angeles, to host events, so I was just glad that I didn’t have to stay in a hotel 6 blocks from where I live. I learned a fair amount about what the more senior municipal development volunteers have focused on during their time, and all the newbies gave a quick talk about what they want to do. A couple people from our group have really done a great job getting started. Others are finding that the people who requested them didn’t really think their ideas through, and are going to have to look for other sources of work.
My time before vacation is filling up, and I am getting better at filling up my free time. Recently some other volunteers have come to visit and we traded media files, so I now have over 10 gigs of new music. I am deleting a lot, but listening and organizing gives me something to do.
I do want to note I have learned how many people can comfortably stay at my house, and the answer is less than 14. The Super bowl was the Sunday before our reconnect and the Sunday after Youth development’s reconnect, so when word got out I was having a party, a whole lot of people showed up. The second night 3 people got a hotel room so they didn’t have to sleep on the floor again, but even after that we had a lot of people on our floor (especially since 3 more showed up, and so we really broke even on the number of people).
I also got my hair cut here for the second time. The first time was so bad, I decided to let another volunteer cut it, so I pretty much have a buzz cut. No pictures yet, since I am still adjusting, but I'll try to post some soon.
I suppose that’s all for now, I will try to keep an eye out for blog worthy stories.