Almost to the Half-Way Point...

So Midterm (a three-day break for the volunteers that takes place in Granada) is coming up this weekend. It marks the halfway point for the summer, which I feel like has snuck up on me. I can't believe that I've already been here for five weeks! I guess I have settled into a sort of bizarre routine...

I spend three days a week in the campo tucking into mounds of rice and beans three times a day, visiting with community members, and reeling off motivational-speak with my volunteers. This is both my favorite and most difficult part of the week. I love getting to know members of the communities I'm supervising-- I'm constantly surprised by how generous and friendly people are, both in opening their homes to my volunteers and their willingness to spend time and energy working with them. This past week though was a bit difficult to get through. The volunteers were expected to have completed mini-grants for the various community improvement projects they have identified that I could collect from them on route and bring back to Granada to be approved. Unfortunately, for a lot of reasons, not one of the three grants I was collecting was completed. I was torn between frustration that I was going to have to spend my weekend in Granada running around getting estimates from hardware stores, talking to contacts, etc. (which I did end up doing) and also really understanding why everything hadn't been completed. They all have great ideas for projects, and although things are and will be a bit slow to get started, I know they'll turn out well. I'm currently getting grants for a library, park benches, and a mural approved by senior staff. So it's very exciting work that I get to do and I have the incredible luxury of getting to seeing tangible projects be realized while I'm here-- but there are definitely daily frustrations. Like sometimes I think if I never have to get on another public school bus it'll be too soon. This past week on route I had to wait an hour for a bus that was stuck at the ferry. It's been a really bad (non-rainy) winter, so the water level was high enough for the floating cement block that passes as a ferry to get close enough to land to unload the bus. The only solution they have is for this one kid with a pick-axe to hack away at the dirt road so that the group of men surrounding him can fill up burlap sacks with dirt and throw them into the shallow water-- creating a sort of bridge from the ferry to land. Most of the time the buses just don't run when the water is too low. I have the advantage of being a white gringa who will almost always get picked up by passing trucks so I can hitchike when I need to, but sometimes it's too many hours spent sitting by the side of a dusty road for my taste...

Then I spend one day a week in a series of generally frustrating, chaotic, and bureaucratic meetings. People are constantly walking in and out of the tiny office that around 9 or 10 of us crowd into at MINSA, answering phones during the meeting, and managing to talk for hours without really saying anything at all. Our partner agencies occasionally pull through, but are typically more of a headache than anything else. Like the representative from the Ministry of Education who told us that MINED has no books at all to donate to the libraries that our communities want to build. She advised us to try and get donations of books from the very professors of the schools that are helping us fill out the grants because they don't have sufficient textbooks for every subject that is taught to the different grades let alone for individual students. !!! You are the Ministry of Education !!!!! Ugh.

And then the rest of the week is spent in the weird cultural oasis of Granada. The city has no infrastructure but is filled with gringo tourists. So I'm living at a house where we're often without water and electricity but currently sitting at a "Euro" internet cafe and having a piece of coffeecake... A typical week involves quite a bit of rollercoasting through mini culture shock-waves.

Which will start again tomorrow. Having a PB & J sandwiches-filled route picnic for my volunteers on Tuesday, which I know they're dying for. It's funny, I didn't used to like PB & J sandwiches before Amigos...