Dreary Days

Ever since I got back from my site visit, it's been super dreary here in San Bartolo. Cold, rainy, and windy…apparently there's another storm passing through. I get homesick when it rains here. It rains everyday, of course, but I mean when it really rains, like all day and night, cloudy-gray-full-of-rain-day rain. Those are the days I find myself missing the comforts of home.

So nervous about my site placement I could scream. 8 am Thursday morning Gonzalo is going to come into our town to hand out our assignments. The nervous energy is palpable. I visited Gonzalo at the office today to express a few last-minute concerns, and he finally gave me the piece of mind that my site is a hot one (I had basically begged him not to place me in a cold mountain region…I don't do well in the cold especially where indoor heating doesn't exist.) So that's all I know. My site is warm. The rest of the details I'll just have to wait until Thursday.

On another note, we had our out-of-site activity yesterday; we were all dreading it, and agreed that if it wasn't a requirement, we wouldn't have done anything. We have no place here in our training community; we're barely here between classes and travels, and we definitely haven't earned the "confianza" of the students or teachers in the school in the few short weeks we've been here working. Thus organizing an out-of-school activity for the youth seemed pretty futile, and honestly quite forced. Nevertheless we decided to have a free showing of Pixar's Wall-E, and ask that the guests pick-up and bring 5 pieces of litter from the streets (a bit of an environmental theme.) Garbage is a real problem here; culturally it's completely acceptable to throw trash in the streets or dump it off the side of the highways. Public garbage cans, where they exist, aren't used. Recycling is basically obsolete unless in larger cities. So we liked the idea of spreading a positive environmental message.

But alas, the day of the showing came and we were pretty worried that nobody would show up. We had talked previously to the mayor, who had agreed to lend us a room in the municipal building, as well as the muni's projector and screen to play the DVD. We hung some flyers in the school hoping that kids would jump at the chance to see a movie on their day off from school. When 3pm rolled around and not a soul had come, we started getting worried. That's when the muni police saved the day. The muni police, whose post is right next door to the room we were patiently waiting with our movie and snacks, must have taken pity on us, because they agreed to make a town-wide announcement (they have a loudspeaker that basically blares announcements to the entire town from time to time) summoning people to come see our "family-friendly" movie, and then proceeded to stand outside ushering passerby kids into our showing. Midway through the film, we had filled the room. It was in no way the policemen's responsibility to help us out, and we of course thanked them dearly. I guess it just shows that you never know who's going to come out of the woodwork to help out a poor gringo trying to do some good. We're going to bake a batch of brownies to thank them for their efforts.