A Two Hour (Week!) Tour

So Ariel came and went (boo!), and the same with World AIDS Day (awesome, but it comes back! I hope Ariel does too!) and that left me with a vacuum of about a month and a half until My Parents Come to Suriname. In some ways, a longer spread might have been preferable, but both visits went awesome overall so I’m not going to second guess anything. But in the mean time…

I spent some just re-establishing myself and my patterns in the village – some hanging out, some teaching English and whatnot, and mostly just trying to catch my breath. However, it soon became apparent that there was too much going on to have much time for that!

It was coming up on Trimester Report Season – yes, your read it correct, Peace Corps, like pregnancy, works in trimesters. Not even JFK knows why (as far as I know). You fill out a report, talk about what you’ve done, basically try to put some metrics on Peace Corps so that we have something to show to Congress and whoever else is looking for the money it takes to fund us. Makes good sense to me.

We also had a 2^nd draft of our Community Diagnostic Report due. This was the exercise we went through during the first 3 months in the village to help us learn our way around and form a basis for communicating with outside organizations, future volunteers, etc. Updating it…doesn’t make as much sense to me at this point after being in the game for a while. The thought process was very useful, but everything gets re-written so hard to fit different grants and organizations’ needs that having a general document to use as a base doesn’t really help. Nobody wants to read a 10-pager on your village. And since there isn’t anyone coming after us…won’t do Peace Corps folks any good. I was told it was a good legacy to leave for our village to use in the future, but there are no plans to translate it into a language that my villagers use (or that the majority of organizations that will remain here after Peace Corps leaves use – I’m talking about Dutch) so that didn’t fly super well with me either. So yeah. I did it, but wasn’t excited.

What was very exciting, however, was the need to actually get started on that Boy’s Camp I’ve talked about a bit!

A lot of uncertainty about money, timing, etc (we are trying to do a lot of camps here) meant that we had a deadline to turn in a general project description and a basic budget to the Peace Corps office by right around the time all that otehr stuff was due. That caught us a bit by surprise, so my working group hadn't really met to talk through/plan/begin as much of the process as we probably should have. Which means I went into go-mode.

I had a template budget from the previous camp I helped out with and another group working on similar stuff, except with girls, so we were all bouncing around making progress. I started making phone calls, working in excel, just generally going after it. But then, we ran out of electricity in my village. And the solar panels at the museum where I usually sit to work (and charge) also died for awhile.

Soooo...I decided it made sense to go to the city a bit early. I actually finished most of the budget in the village on battery (amazing limited resources can focus the mind), but with everything going on I headed in.

And woah. It was a busy two weeks! It was a long, long time in the city but I made good use of it. Pictures were uploaded, budgets and reports and whatnot were written, I attended about a million different meetings and different attempts to beg for money about different things. And man did I put in a lot of work on Boys Camp! Including! Coming up with a name and sweet acronym like GLOW (Girls Leading Our World). Guys Leading would work, but I worry about confusion if it's all the same...but BLOW sure doesn't work....ended up with BILT. Boys Improving Lives Together. Brilliant right? Right?? I didn't here any better suggestions, ok?

So it was a good time, but a looooonnng time in the city. I enjoy the city and the chance to live a very different life for a bit. At the same time, the city is just so jarring...I feel ADD and over caffeinated all the time - even though I am not really either. I don't know why it is, maybe just over stimulation and over access? But either way, it's good to stay a bit in practice at "real" life, whatever that means. Meetings, spreadsheets, selling, buying, pants - you know, stuff like that. I do all that in the village too, actually (well, not the pants), but the cultural context is so different. I like to stay flexible.

Fortunately, the heat and the way this whole Peace Corps thing works definitely does that. It was a good two weeks, but that's all I'm gonna say about it.

Talk to you again shortly.

Evan