So it´s been awhile since I´ve been able to get a post up, I should apologize for that. I´ve actually been somewhat busy recently. The focus of my work recently has been preparations for a theater group that will be coming to Tacabamba this weekend to give a few presentations on the importance of hand washing. I´ve been in contact with some higher ups in the organizational scheme and they only told me that they would like to do 4 presentations in my town and that a reasonable number of people should attend. So with that alone I set off to find a few communities and places in town that would be friendly to a theater presentation, especially on Saturday, the slowest day of the week. But I´ve been able to secure 4 locations, get the word out to a few mothers clubs, the students from the schools, and get a few radio ads out on the local radio station. So I´m hoping for a good turnout….as long as the rain doesn´t rear its ugly head and have one last laugh. Hopefully we are at the end of the rainy season, which robs me of any excuse to make the long hikes to the communities to do some training for health promoters and do work with mothers groups, but that´s a good thing, and will open up some more work opportunities for me. Over the last few weeks I´ve been talking to people of the community about painting a world map on the wall of the high school, with the help of the high school kids of course. It should be fun and get the kids involved in learning some geography. I heard some statistic somewhere that said something like one fourth of the united states population cannot find the US on a world map (but 94.4567% of statistics are made up on the spot), and I´m thinking education on geography might be a little bit worse here. It´s a great plan and everyone wants to get involved with it, but the rain and paint don´t mix too well, so I´ve just been sitting twiddling my thumbs and waiting on that project.
But of course it´s not all work here, recently we had our easter vacation, for which we received a couple free vacation days as volunteers. A large number of us made the way to the coast to a beach town called Mancora, rumored to be one of the best beaches in Peru, and I sure was not disappointed. It was great to be able to get away from site and relax for a little bit. Being in site, as great as it is, is a 24/7 responsibility, you´re always supposed to be on your game because you´re representing your country and working hard to find your place in the culture. Honestly it is nice every once in awhile to be able to relax and just act like a tourist, and Mancora was the perfect place to do it. It seemed like everyone spoke English (catering to the usual crowd of tourists that don´t know Spanish) so I didn´t even have to speak Spanish if I didn´t want to. We stayed at a hostel popular with international travelers and met a bunch of really cool people from Canada, Sweden, Germany and Australia. But after a couple days the vacation came to an end and we made our way back to the mountains and the rain.
All in all life is going great, still healthy, still trying to train for that silly marathon and looking forward to getting some new projects going in the next few weeks. Hope everyone is still doing well back home, and I hopefully will be able to get the next blog post up a lil´ quicker!
