They said this day would come after 3 months

And, indeed, it did. The day when I would feel like everything is coming together.

I´m really excited about the prospects of my primary project. Finally, I have a clear idea of what I´m actually going to be doing for the next two years! So on Friday I got this brilliant idea from the NGO that Cactus works with: use schools as a development agent. Soon, I will be working to form commissions of teachers from all 10 primary schools in the District. This is important because there are three types of teachers, each with a different teaching strategy: the "unidocente" who teaches the ENTIRE school him or herself, the "multigrado" who teaches multiple grades, and the "polidocente" who teaches one class and one grade. The commissions will have the responsibility of doing things like performing a big diagnostic of the community, working on a District-wide environmental curriculum, planning environmental projects and involving the community. The last two commissions will be the focus of my work. Basically, through the schools, I will be working with the community on conservation and other development issues (nutrition, hygiene, self-esteem, gender equality, etc.). Meanwhile, I will be working with that big fishing caserío, Becará, as a pilot program. I have been told by two different people that this is a great idea because there are many organized and potentially active associations and groups of women, men and youth in that community. On one Saturday in the future, I will be going around Becará with the secretary of the Municipality, who also happens to be a leader in the the caserío, to meet other leaders that I can work with in the future. The teachers at the school also seem pretty interested in working on environmental issues and with the community. They are eating up the information I have been translating and adapting for them from this wonderful book called "Developing an Environmental Curriculum in Schools," which I got in the mail thanks to Peace Corps. I´d be completely lost without that book.

The director of the environment program in Perú also came to visit my site on Thursday after a regional training conference we had in Piura. It was reassuring that he thought my strategy was good. This is important to me since my project is different from the other environment volunteers´ projects because I am working in a "community" of 15,000+ people, with 10 primary school and that covers a huge geographic area. It´s a lot larger in terms of my target population -- some volunteers are teaching in one school with 30 kids total -- and I don´t have any counterparts that will actually be working hand in hand with me. When each volunteer presented his or her project, most people´s counterparts spoke more than the volunteer about the project or were the ones that came up with the work plan. I don´t even think my counterpart could explain the work plan right now, haha. But I am definitely not complaining -- I did ask for a "difficult" site with a lot of independence, after all, as my director reminded me. He also asked me if I would be bothered in the future by not being able to form any intimate bonds or observe the personal development of a group of people, like most volunteers will, thereby losing out on the "real Peace Corps experience." I told him I think I´ll be able to see that happen, and if I don´t, as long as I see changes and believe that it was more or less effective, I´ll be happy. So no dramatic vignettes about this kid I worked with or that woman who I developed a bond with in the future. Maybe.

At my site, my director and I had a hilarious conservation with my host parents in which they proceeded to complain about how their son is in love so he comes home late instead of studying so they lock him out and he bothers the whole family with his knocking and whistling all night long and how their eldest daughter is anti-social and doesn´t want anything to do with potential lovers and suitors and how they tell her she has to talk to me every once in a while and how there are kids in town who are alcoholics and the fishermen booze up during the closed season when they can´t fish and are bored. All in all, it was a pretty good sketch of my life in town.

After he left, I rushed back to Piura because my friends convinced me I had to join them to see "Walk the Line", the Johnny Cash movie, on its first day out in the theatre...even though I had already been out of site for 3 nights due to this training. It´s true that there is such thing as "out-of-site guilt" when you feel guilty for not being in site, even if it´s for something reasonable. So at almost 9 at night, I guiltily returned home, but not before calling my host mom to tell her I´d be home later than planned, since she´s a worrier. She was the only one there when I got back. After serving me dinner, she told me so much about the family I never knew: that they lived in Lima for 5 years, that my host sister once had to attend University classes in Piura until 10:30 or 11 at night so my host mom had to nervously find a place for her to stay in the City since she couldn´t safely come home that late, that another daughter once overslept on the combi and by the time she made it back home my host mom was in tears, and that the "padrino" called my host dad that day to tell him that he had to start working that very same day...so he´ll be fishing for the next two or so months. Just like that. Gone the same day. What a crazy life. What a miserable job. They thought he was going to leave around April 15th.

Anyway, things are looking good. Except Rese lost the MSA elections by less than 300 votes, perhaps due to some election fraud by the "winning" party. The capacity of Michigan´s campus politics to mimic U.S. national politics never ceases to amaze me.