Readjustment and lessons on running etiquette...

So I returned to site a little under a week ago from a volunteer conference on the coast and have been having some trouble readjusting to life back at site. Our conference was called "reconnect", it's an opportunity for the volunteers of my training group to get back together and chat about what's going well in site, what's not going so well, and have a good time seeing each other for the first time in 3 months. The fact that the conference took place on a beautiful beach and included St. Patrick's Day were added bonuses. Some other volunteers and I showed up a day early to "enjoy" some surfing and relaxing on the beach. I say "enjoy" surfing because as it was the second time of my life that I went surfing, I didn't have quite as much success as the veteran surfers, but it was fun just the same. Unfortunately this reconnect conference took place two days after "theater camp" (see last post). So between the two conferences I was away from site for almost two weeks. When I returned a couple things had changed around here. After spending two weeks on the coast it seemed like it rained so much harder than I remembered. My family, who rents out rooms in the house, found two new tenants. The first is a physical education teacher at the local elementary school, who should be a great connection for future programs at the school, and the other is a young architect who works in the municipality. She can't quite figure out why I don't also have to work 9 to 5 like she does, she should get used to it soon enough. Also in the health center, I went to visit a friend of mine but found his office was moved in the building because they were knocking down walls to accommodate the expansion of the building, they are adding 7 more offices on the second floor as well as an operation room and expanded areas for patient care on the first floor. This is a very very big expansion for the health center, most volunteers have health posts that maybe have 4 or 5 rooms for everything necessary at the post.

Recently I have begun training for a marathon here in Peru that will take place in July. I ran the austin marathon in february of 2008, but haven't been running much since then. The last few days I've been going on short runs around site and the first was on sunday, that just happened to be market day here in Tacabamba. This means that all the families were coming down from their communities to sell cheese, cows, milk, fruits, vegetables, and all sorts of other things in Tacabamba. Because of this, every road out of town was crowded with cows, goats, sheep, horses and people walking and giving funny looks at the gringo that seems to be running for absolutely no reason. Around here the people "control" their cows by wrapping a piece of rope around their horns or neck and using that to guide them, I say "control" because these large animals can really do whatever they want if so motivated, a piece of rope around their horns held by a 12-year-old will only slow them down a little bit. A motortaxi might appear suddenly on the road and this cow will jump across to the other side of the road, because of this at times I would have to slow to a walk and carefully make my way around cows and horses. All the while with the lyical poety of Busta Rhymes playing in my ears. I think I'll avoid running on Sunday mornings from now on.

After looking forward and preparing material for the reconnect conference for the last three months, it's taken some time to get readjusted to life and working in town, it doesn't help that it rains heavily every morning and afternoon with only a few hours of sunlight between. Also a friend of mine on the coast was able to hunt down a hammock for me that I was able to hang on the roof of my house, that's been quite a motivation killer, as sitting in the hammock and reading (yes, peace corps is very hard)is much more appealing to hiking around the campo in knee high mud. This video project with the kids of the colegio (high school) should be taking off soon. It also recently occurred to me that a town of this size (7,000) should really have a library, not even the colegeio has one. Creating a library has been a daunting task for other volunteers, so hopefully the challenges created by that will be enough to get me out of my hammock and start working. All in all I don't really have many complaints, I'm still healthy and besides the rain, everything is going great. Take care, and I hope everyone is doing well back home!!

Here are a couple pictures from the reconnect conference, the sunsets were amazing...




And we enjoyed a couple green beers for Paddy´s day...

Watching the final sunset of the conference at the end of a rickity pier...