safe and sound in my new home

Well, it’s been a while since I posted a blog with anything more than pictures so it’s about time for that. I’ve been in my new community for a little more than a week now, and I’m really enjoying myself. I’ve been spending my days meeting a ton of new people each day and taking in the gorgeous sites. And, on Tuesday nights they show Grey’s Anatomy on tv so, how could I complain??

I’ve learned a lot in the last week, too. Everything from new Spanish words to how to get frogs out of the house at night. I have also observed a lot of interesting tendencies that we were told about but that I hadn’t really seen so much in my training community. I don’t want to say it’s a characteristic of people in rural communities, because that would be wrong and I’d be guilty of the same thing. But, a number of people that I have met tend to generalize people into specific groups. For example, “Chinos (people from China – although they would call a person from Vietnam ‘Chino’ as well) eat cats and dogs all the time” or “your parents must be really good lawyers because they are Jewish”. It’s an interesting phenomenon and I’m not exactly sure yet how I’m going to confront it, if at all. I think part of it has to do with the education here. For those in elementary school, it is very limited because they only have a few hours a day. Also, since there are only 2 teachers for 6 grades, many grades are mixed in classes, which again, limits what they can learn. The teachers seem to be doing really well with what they are given but, unfortunately, it’s not a lot.

So, clearly this leaves me with a ton of things I’d like to do in this community. And I’m sure a lot more will come up as I live here longer. But, when it comes to education, I’d like to do a lot of out-of-school things to help these kids learn a little more; things like life-skills, sports clubs, girls groups, book clubs, and so on. They also all want English classes, since they are not getting this in school either. The second part of my job has to do with organizational development. Under this goal, I will be working with all the committees and associations that are formed to help them in the projects they want to do. We will hopefully be able to get a medical center built here so that a doctor can come to our town more than once a month. Other things they have mentioned so far include improving the roads and bridges, working on finishing the church, and so on. Finally, the third part of RCD jobs is that of economic development. This will consist of trying to create more jobs for people in the town. We definitely need to work on this since there are very few jobs available in our community. This might get done by working in rural or eco-tourism. I’m obviously not so sure how we’re going to do this one yet but, hopefully we’ll come up with something. If you have any ideas or suggestions for any of these, I’d love to hear them!

Well, here are some pictures from my first week here. There are a few of the green-ness and then a bunch from a reinado (kind of like a beauty pageant) that we had this past weekend. It was for younger girls and boys and then grandmoms and grandpops. The older woman that won is my host grandmom. There is a picture with her and her 2 daughters (my host mom is the one on the left in pink). Then there´s one of her grandkids and great-grandkids. You´ll also see a picture of the 4 winners and one of a some younger kids. I hope you enjoy!