My life at work

The past couple of weeks have been busy busy with not a lot of down time to really think or reflect, which is why I haven't written in a while. I have been traveling a lot, mostly with the ministry, 4-5 days or so out of every week. Last week I met with the other volunteer who is with me on the project and our Peace Corps bosses, and after a lot of reiterations and fine tuning of the key questions we made up we finally had a good base, correctly expressed in Spanish, of what we want to ask in our diagnostic. It felt like a relief to have finally narrowed down the number of directions we could take with this project and to have found a focus amidst the ambiguity of it all. However, once back at work, I found that the schedule I have built for myself over the past few weeks as a result of not having much direction didn't leave me a lot of time to actually implement the tasks involved in the diagnostic. I have made it part of my routine to participate in as many ministry activities as possible as part of orienting myself, and now realize that these occupy the majority of my time and some of them have even become commitments while not really being pertinent to my assignment. For example, I went one day with the lawyer from the ministry to a training on human rights and gender equality, which was actually very interesting... but it turns out the training was part of a series that now occupies my Tuesdays. Also because I have attended so many events, it seems like my presence is expected. It has mostly been fun to attend them and get to see so many places. Like yesterday, about 10 of us went to a cultural day at the school in Rancho Quemado, a really pretty place on the very top of a rocky mountain. There they served us elote (corn on the cob) and atol (a pudding-like hot drink made also of corn). It was all quite lovely, however, the main objective of the event and of driving an hour and a half to get there, as far as I could tell, was to eat (and drink) corn. And that was a day's work. The point being that if I am going to get stuff done, I may have to find a way to politely decline these sorts of invitations once in a while.

I have also recently started working with a youth group who do volunteer projects here in Gotera. They are affiliated with the ministry of social inclusion rather than education, yet their objectives seem to be strikingly similar to what our assignment is with the ministry. They also want to form municipal youth groups around volunteerism, and they really seem to have their stuff together. The only difference is that instead of doing a diagnostic about the incidence of volunteerism, they are actually doing the volunteerism, which is pretty exciting. In some ways they are kind of ahead of where we are, but in what seems to be the typical fashion here of doing things, they are diving right in without a lot of forethought. It will be interesting to see how it goes for them, and their successes and failures will probably serve us in planning the national program. So far though, it has been fun participating just as a member of their group. They all want to learn yoga and I am also thinking of doing gender and development training with some of them so that they can start gender initiatives like girls' groups. Their building is in disrepair and today they made plans to clean it up and beautify it, maybe with some murals. It seems both an advantage and disadvantage that they are closely associated with a government ministry. It is to their benefit that the space is provided and it gives them legitimacy, but on the other hand they are subject to the ridiculousness of the bureaucracy here. For example, in order to paint a mural, even on the inside, they would have to ask permission from the mayor, because by law all government buildings must be blue and white, even though they receive almost no funding or support from the government. The whole place is also full of old and broken furniture and other junk, none of which they can get rid of because it has been "inventoried" by the government and they would be held responsible for its disappearance. Hopefully though, si dios quiere, they will find some creative solutions to these obstacles. The kids themselves are great. I have gotten to know a few of them, and some of their stories are terrifying. Some have been through horrible things, like having their friends shot in the face in front of them on buses, being robbed at gunpoint repeatedly, and working for public health collecting the bodies of the victims of gang violence. Yet they keep riding buses because they have to to get to the university, and they keep doing volunteer work because they haven't lost hope. It makes me wonder what made them turn out this way, so resilient, because they could have just as easily become the perpetrators of violence. And, more importantly I wonder, "How do we make more kids like them?"