We’ve had a very busy couple of months here which is why this is our first blog post in quite a while. We spent the latter end of January finishing up our community diagnostic and preparing for our 3-month in-service training conference (where we presented the results of our diagnostic). Then we spent most of February working on getting moved into our new house and planning out our work for the next year. Only now have things started to calm down a bit in the sense that we have time to focus on other things.
So, we are very happy to announce that we are FINALLY moved in to our new house. We made an agreement with one of our community members a couple of months ago that if he built us a house, we would rent it for the 20 or so months we have left of our service. It seemed like a great plan until the costs of building the house became more expensive week after week and the people building the house continued to push back the deadline. In the end, we had to pay over twice the amount we expected to pay to build the house in the form of an advance on our rent, and we had to wait 2 weeks later than we expected to move in. The good news is that now we have a nice new house and don’t have to worry about paying rent! The house is certainly a lot nicer than we thought we would have in the Peace Corps.
In terms of our work, we’ve started our health groups – one for adults and one for the youth. We are having a lot of fun with both of them. The women are very interested and motivated to learn about how they can improve their health and that of their families. We have a good group of youth too who have a lot of fun participating in our class activities. Hopefully we will be able to get a good amount of promoters from both of these groups.
Now that our health groups are off the ground, we’ve started working on some other potential projects as well. We had a meeting with the community several weeks ago in which we asked them to list and then prioritize their top desired projects for the community. Of course, they chose a paved road first, which unfortunately is not something we will be able to do in our time here. But another high priority they listed is the building of a clinic, which makes a lot of sense for a community with two Peace Corps health volunteers. And luckily for us, we already have a head start.
About ten years ago, one of the political parties started construction of a clinic in our campo. But after losing the national elections they left the clinic unfinished. So we basically have the unfinished structure of a clinic with just walls and a roof. We had a civil engineer come out to check the building a few days ago and not surprisingly, he said it had some structural problems. So it looks like we will have to do some repairs on the structure that we already have. The good news though is that it is still safe enough to use as the frame for building the new clinic. This will definitely save us some time and money.
So this will probably be the focus of our work in the coming months. We are also contemplating starting some small income generation projects and business skills workshops with the women’s group here but that will depend on our time and resources.
We know this blog post is already very long but we also wanted to take a moment and thank everyone who has been sending us packages. We can’t tell you how nice it is to receive gifts and news from home! Those small gifts help us make it through the day sometimes. So thank you and keep them coming! J
Until our next blog post!
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