Month Nine: Complete (or ´What would you say...you do here?´)

Self-importrait time!:

Boring!

If there’s a bright side to this latest edition of the Month X: Complete series it’s that, having run a few calculations, it turns out that nine months represents precisely one third of our service period.

This milestone provides an excellent opportunity for reflection. Looking back through the panablog archives (and if you haven’t done so recently, do yourself a favor and ask for a day off work so you can really dig in), we realized that out of 69 posts, precisely one of them mentioned actual, real work. And that many readers might be wanting to ask something along the lines of, “What would you say…you do here?”:

Anyway, we felt like this might be a good time to clear up any confusion about our workload: it doesn’t just seem like we haven’t had a lot to do. It’s actually that we haven’t had a lot to do.

This has been frustrating.

Originally, we had been assigned to our community to work with a cooperative that wanted to start a pine logging operation (the community is the in the middle of a pine reserve that the government planted in the 70s with the intent of it being harvest thirty years later):

However, about a month before we arrived in site, the president of the coop, who had been one of the most active community members in lobbying Peace Corps for volunteers, was forced out of his position over concerns about money management. The new president is a very lovely and motivated woman…who is not the least bit interested in our help.

So. Our main project is on indefinite hold. At first this was disappointing, but then we started to think that it might end up working out better for everyone considering that: neither of us know anything about logging. I assume that saws are involved. I have some vague idea that flannel shirts are the preferable attire. But that’s about it.

Anyway, we consequently shifted our focus to helping out at the school. But, since the school year for the entire nation got delayed for a month, we’ve been kind of...waiting. A lot.

The good news is that school has officially, actually started up, and we’ve started teaching English to the grade schoolers, and are planning a class on computers as soon as the solar-panel powered electric system for the two PCs the school just got is up and running. We´ll see... But the teaching English thing. We´ve definitely got that going.