6 months

In all the excitement I completely forgot to mention that as of December 5th it has been 6 months since I departed for my life in the Peace Corps.

There is a a saying in the Peace Corps community that the days crawl by at a snail's pace, but the months and years fly by. I must admit that as cliche as it is, that is how it has been going. Each day feels like it is never going to end and that it will only bring about another endless day. However time has flown by in aggregate and I can't believe how long I've been away. Seriously it feels like training just ended, but another group of volunteers has already come in, trained, swore in and moved into their sites, and that is nearly a 3 month process. I am already filling out my second quarterly report, which means 6 months and I stare at my computer screen dumbfounded at all the time that has gone by and all the activities I need to recall in order to fill in all the boxes and such.

I am now realizing that I have been more out of contact than I need to be with nearly everyone except my family. I have missed friend's birthdays and have been otherwise derelict in my duty to actually talk to people. I mean I have a cell phone and internet access on a semi-regular basis now, and I could call people if I just knew their phone numbers.

Busy Busy Busy

Been a little while since my last post. I've been a little busy since Thanksgiving. Mostly Peace Corps stuff and lots of trips in and out of my site.

I had a meeting with my program director and all the Municipal Developement volunteers from my region of the country that was both refreshing and beautiful. We went to an area in my department called Juayua where we stayed in a quaint little hotel for a night and discussed our work and our problems. These things get us a little more connected with our job and give us a little kickstart when we are running out of steam.

I also managed to get out to San Vicente for what was several days of language class and what is called In Service Training. That basically means I sat through about 20 hours of spanish and about 10 hours of technical training. We learned some of the more technical stuff like how to properly fill out a few types of grant forms and what we should do before helping our communities look for grant money.

December snuck up on me in the midst of being pretty busy and it doesn't look like December will really bring about a change of pace. I am on my way back to my site today, but will be returning to the capital in only 3 days to work on putting together a presentation on how to run meetings. In between now and then I will be teaching my social promoters how to run some ice-breakers to freshen up their ability to run capacity building meetings. Somewhere in there I need to find time to organize my personal life because I just decided to move houses and packed my stuff up and put it in a temporary room in my new house. Then if that is all not enough, I need to brush up my web developement skills and head back to the capital on the 20th to put together a training for that. The end goal of course being a day workshop to teach a group of volunteers how to put together a simple website to promote their communities. Before I get that website workshop put together I need to find time to have another little training session for my social promoters on how to run a meeting and how to run a capacity building workshop, hopefully with the help of someone on the staff.

Of course December also has the holidays so that will also take up a bit of time.