first week in my new house

12 jan

I´ve had a good and eventful week. Monday and Tuesday I spent buying things for my house and setting things up, and I painted my bathroom orange. I´ve been getting to know my neighbors. On Tuesday I went to the library for story hour. About 12 little kids came to listen. The librarian is a great story teller, she read Curious George, or Jorge el Curioso. After the story, she showed the kids different species of monkeys on the computer and then they drew and colored monkeys. They were all really cute. I love the library, there are so many good books in Spanish, and I can use the computers for free.

On Wednesday I went to a nearby town for a meeting with an organization that is building a garbage dump and beginning an environmental education program. I´m really interested in doing a similar project in my area. I was with two other volunteers having lunch before the meeting and my project manager, Jorge, called me to say he was on his way to visit me for my site visit. We all get site visits in the first few months in site so they can see how we are doing and what we´re working on. Jorge apparently sent me an email, but I don´t check email every day, so I had no idea he was coming. So then I was kind of flustered, because I had a meeting, but I had to meet with him, too.
But Jorge said no problem, he could come to where I was and meet with me there Jorge did our training, so we were with him for 3 months. He´s a great person and I get along really well with him. He got there a little before 2, and the meeting was at 2, so he came with to the meeting. It was a very interesting and beneficial meeting. We talked about the landfill, garbage collection, recycling possibilities, and environmental education. After the meeting, I met with Jorge and talked about everything I had been doing and my experiences. Then he came back the next day, Thursday, to meet with my counterpart. Jorge had some good advice and he said that he thinks I will do great things in my site. He probably says that to everyone, but it was nice to hear. Also, he brought me a bike that another volunteer had left. So now I have a bike, and I´m going to try to ride it to the aldeas in the mountains. He also came to see my house and he said it´s very nice and it´s secure.

I really like my house. It has one main room, which is the kitchen livingroom, two bedrooms, and a bathroom. I painted my bathroom orange one night, like the color of a ripe orange, and yesterday I painted two walls of the main room kind of a forest green color. It´s really pretty. I´m going to paint a third wall a light brown and the other wall I might leave white, because it´s a really high wall. My bedroom I´m going to paint blue and purple. I bought some traditional type blankets, made in Guatemala, to use as curtains. I have my bed, a shelf set for clothes, a plastic table, and a plastic chair. The carpenter is building me a large, tall table for my kitchen, since there aren´t any counters. It´s almost done, he just has to put some shelves in the bottom. I bought a 2 burner elctric table-top stove on Thursday. I don´t have a fridge, but some volunteers are leaving in April, so I´m going to wait and get one of their fridges, because I don´t want to have to buy one. Before I bought the stove, I was toasting bread over a candle flame. It felt very Peace Corps. I have a nice little backyard with banana trees, coffee plants, a white poinsetta, and some other flowers. And I have my own new pila to wash clothes and dishes, and it´s tall, which is nice, since I´m tall. There´s no sink in the house, so I use the pila for everything.

In the next couple weeks I need to meet with the school principal and the highschool principal to plan some things, and I need to meet with the environmental offices of all the nearby towns to discuss the garbage situation. I don´t have much time before school starts. The week of the 20th, I will be in a small nearby town to help a medical brigade. Doctors from the US are coming for a few days and they need translators. I think it will be interesting to see them at work and to learn some medical terms in Spanish. And the first week of February I need to go to a Peace Corps meeting. Everyone from my project, Munincipal Development, is going to this meeting to share our work and listen to some talks. It will be nice to see people I haven´t seen and hear about what they are doing. So I have a lot to organize and not that much time.
I´m really happy living in town. I love being able to walk around and say hi to people and go to the park and the library and it´s much easy to work and organize things. It was a good experience living in the mountains, but harder to get anything done. I´m looking forward to the next couple months and the projects I think we can start.