June 3, 2011
Good news! I received my first grant! All thanks and praises be to the Santa Barbara Peace Corps Association, who funded my project to build a small pavilion at the school. Basically, the school director approached me with the idea a few months back about building a pavilion over the old disused school latrines. This will just be a simple floor and roof held up by supports, no walls. This will be a good spot to have class outdoors when the weather is nice and to send kids to do some quiet reading. Although this is not a big project, it will be nice to leave a physical structure at the school and know I have made a lasting impact, albeit a small one. Construction should begin in a week or two.
Last week I helped facilitate a visit of four engineers from Engineers Without Borders in a neighboring volunteer’s site. They wanted to teach a few lessons in the school about volcanoes, so I helped translate and manage the kids. We made model volcanoes with the older ones and just helped the younger ones draw volcanoes. I had such I good time that I am going to help a different group of engineers next week. It is nice to see other places in the country and work with enthusiastic gringos who want to do good put need some linguistic and cultural assistance. (My gringo enthusiasm is not what it once was)
The soccer teams I was coaching have kind of fallen apart, both because of people not showing up and some of the kids not behaving and generally pissing me off. The fact that the rainy season has arrived doesn’t help either. I might just call it a season and try again when the dry season comes.
I am really excited to host my dad and Marietta who are coming down here the 13th for a ten day visit. I haven’t had any visitors yet and it will be great to show someone where I live and what I do. Also, we are going to rent a car, which opens up a new world of possibilities here; we should get to see some of the great sites this country has to offer.
On a sad note, one of the two dogs my host family owns died the other day. The family had three dogs to begin with, Uno, Dos and Tres. Tres was the mother (go figure) but if you remember, was lost for a while and we later found her head in the woods. Well Dos just met his end too. It was really bizarre because I was having a dream that the dog was eating from the table and I kicked it, but harder than I meant to. This broke its neck, and it started stumbling around and yelping. I knew it was dying and could not believe what I had just done. Then I awoke to people yelling outside, and when I got to up and went to look the dog was moaning and twitching, just about to die. I guess the noise it was making seemed into my dream; it was really creepy. One of our neighbors had gotten tired of him barking all night and had fed him poison, which I think also happened to his mother. It was sad since I had made friends with Dos, he was a really sweet and playful dog, one that seemed to almost be human. Now we are down to just Uno.