Walk the Dog

It is amazing how quickly once can settle into a routine. Before I picked up Kaya I never really thought about my comings or goings. My house was where I slept and where I could catch some time alone without people constantly asking me why I don't have a girlfriend and why I don't go out with Alana. (Another Volunteer, surprisingly everyone seems to know her and they all think we should be married by now.) But now my house is that place I have to go to every few hours to take care of my dog. And I can't think about spending more than a few hours away without making special arrangements. My day pretty much goes like this now:

-Get up at 6 or earlier and take the dog out, then feed her and do my thing while she is eating. Take her out again just before leaving.
-Go and do whatever morning work I have, usually meetings in the Alcaldia or Cara Sucia.
-Get back after lunch and let the dog out again. Spend a little more time with her, then head out again.
-Get back around 4, take the dog out and then play with her for a while. Or perhaps take her for a walk and get looked at like a crazy man.
-Make the dog's dinner around 6 and either concurrently make mine or go get some food after she eats. Either way, she eats before me.
-Relax and do my thing at night, but keep a constant watchful eye out for house soiling. Get a few minutes of obedience training in here and there. (She can pretty much sit on command now)

So with all that I am set to try to leave Kaya for about 2.5 days and play some fútbol in the East. I hope she takes it well and I hope she doesn't revert to peeing all over Erin's house while I am gone. I don't really know how she will respond to staying with someone other than me for any period of time, but its gonna happen eventually, so we'll see now.

Work is going pretty well. There are lots of regional type meetings happening so there is plenty of time to interact with other Volunteers right now. My Social Promotion team is going full steam teaching some of the themes I had written and I am tying to search out some other work to do since I neither get invited to each workshop, no do I want to be at all of them. I will attend the ones that are for the communities closest to mine. I seem set to help behind the scenes starting a municipality wide women's movement, which seems like it might be pretty interesting. Of course I won't be able to enjoy the fruits of that or flaunt my involvement, but thats ok.

Anywho, I got bored and shaved my beard into a fu manchu. I get bored with my facial hair easily, and what else can I do with the prohibitive amounts of hair on my face? So I goof around a bit for funsies. Interstingly enough only one comment so far. I would have expected a slightly larger response, especially from all the female volunteers. I guess the stache is so popular here that any variation means I'm a real man.

Kaya

Ok so I talked about it for a while and thought about it even longer and I finally just went for it and got a puppy. She is a 2.5 month old Boxer and I named her Kaya. Obviously you all want pictures, so here you go.



Kaya

I am still figuring things out a bit, so I am temporarily using a stacking cube shelving unit as a substitute crate for training purposes. (Crate training is a humane way to housebreak a dog and keep your house safe from chewing.) She doesn't have any proper toys yet since there isn't exactly a pet store around here and people don't think of dogs the same way we are used to up north. But I am working on it. On the 26th I will head to the capital for other reasons and check out a pet store with my program director while I am there. Erin, the other volunteer in my town, is excited to babysit for me whenever I need to leave for a short time and she has already met Kaya.

Obviously I am super excited and don't want to leave her ever, but she needs to learn that I won't be there all the time. For now she is a little crybaby when I leave, but hopefully that will change with time.

Translate This

So I got into the capital yesterday after a few days spent at another volunteer's site translating for a group of engineering students from CSU working with Engineers Without Borders. Basically it was a good experience and I am glad to have tried it out, and will be heading out this afternoon to try out a different sort of translating, for children.

Basically my translating time was spent with a team of the engineers that were surveying the community so they can properly estimate costs for the water project they are working on. Since there were only two translators, and the other was busy with another task for the engineers I was running back and forth between the people by the surveying viewfinder and the pole. That got interesting in spots where curious community members wanted to know why some houses were having marks put in front and others not, and also when some over-zealous men wanted to flirt a bit with the women engineers who don't speak Spanish. It can be hard to notice exactly when and where you should be to translate, especially when someone is barely within your view. Certainly it can be fun to watch the fireworks as complete chaos ensues due to inability to communicate, at least it can be amusing to the party that actually understands what is going on.

Aside from funny occurrences, translating can be an odd job. It is very difficult to keep yourself out of a conversation and instead simply translate what is being said or asked. One good example is that someone will often ask a question that I know the answer to, and I need to remember to pose the question to the other people instead of simply answering it myself. Plus it is hard to know how much of side conversations to translate, since the natural tendency of people who can speak a different language is to use it as a bit of a cover knowing that the other parties will never know exactly what was said. I do enjoy it though and I want to keep trying to do it as time goes on to see if I can get a little better at translating while people are still talking. I think the need to immediately repeat what was said in a different language could also result in better comprehension.

Happy New year

Let me start by wishing the obvious Happy New Year to the maybe 7 people who read this blog. I missed the opportunity to wish anyone a Merry Christmas or Happy Chanukah, but my internet schedule was limited in December.

I had big plans for December, and most of them that were work related wound up falling through. I had planned to run a little workshop for my social promotion team to teach them how to run a meeting better and how to give a more effective informal training, but it got canceled. I had planned for one of the Volunteer Coordinators to come out and help me, but alas, since it was canceled she couldn't come. My plan to teach them some ice breakers went awry and got canceled as well because the meeting that I was to present them in went way overtime and my chance was lost. The city hall closed on the 22nd, so after that there was no working in that capacity. All work I did after that day was either done in the Peace Corps office or shut up in my house on my computer.

As much as work failed I did manage to get along pretty well otherwise. I went to San Sal a few times for meetings for other projects with Peace Corps Volunteers. Also I met up with a work friend of my mother's and spent Christmas Eve and day with them. They took me to a nice beach and to a town that is literally all pupuserias. I managed to eat a few pupusas that stand out in my mind as some of the best I have had, which is hard to do considering the sheer quantity of pupusas I wind up eating.


cslom

I also hung out with some community members who are part of a festivities committee and we went to a waterpark in a different department. I spent the day back and forth hanging out with the kids in the kiddie pools and trying to convince the guys to go down the water slides. Eventually I got some of the guys to go down the big, slow, curvy slide and some of the guys and a few of the kids to go down the slide that used the inner-tubes. There was a third slide, a big red one that had about a thirty foot straight down drop that nobody was going on all day. I figured it couldn't be that bad and so I did it and got a standing ovation by the people in the pool below. I wound up being one of only 3 people to go down that slide all day. I would have gone down it several more times, but I almost lost one of my brand new contact lenses on the first go and that was enough for me not to encore my performance. But now lots of my community members are talking about my trip to the waterpark and especially my love of slides.


cslom

We also had a bit of a holiday party with the social promotion team, complete with secret santa gifts and a home grilled hairless sheep. It was good fun and good bonding. I left just in time for everyone to start drinking, which I am not fond of sticking around for, for various reasons including my inability to understand drunken spanish and my desire not to promote drinking. Either way it was fun and a good chance to bond with the people I work with.

Now I am back in the City Hall and preparing to get back to the grind. This month I plan to get out and try my hand at translating, first for some engineers in a friend's site and second at a children's camp at a gorgeous lake. I have never translated before and I think this will be a good opportunity to see how I do. also this month I will finish up some work with other volunteers getting some charlas together and head out to play a soccer game. All in all I'd say it looks pretty exciting for January.