Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Long time no blog

Oh my, it's been a while since I've written. I had that gently pointed out to me by my friend Rosie, so everyone has her to thank for what I'm sure will be a scintillating blog post.

Well, the last month and a half have felt simultaneously like a marathon and a sprint. I have hardly been in site, although it's quickly becoming the place where I most like to be. I've gotten really comfortable there doing things (like taking a shower outside and having passerbys yell "Molly, you're bathing, huh?") that I would have found very bizarre 8 months ago.

I've also been going to conferences, and my family came and visited for a week. We went to a beautiful resort in Bocas del Toro (basically the other side of the country from where I live, and it was my first visit there) and drank delicious, fruity concoctions for a week. I have to say, as wonderful as it was to see my family (I love you guys!) and as beautiful as Bocas was, I felt very out of place there. All of my basic needs were taken care of, and all I had to do was "relax". Turns out I have a hard time doing that. My basic needs and my community efforts are what I do every day, and without that, I was kind of frustrated. At the end, I was kind of antsy to get back to what I understand and know. Sorry Mom, apparently I can never go home.

Things in the community are good. My Mom and I went up to my water source and measured the flow of water and I discovered that my water source is giving out 108,000 gallons of water a day. Which is more than 4x what is needed for the 3 community it serves. This brings up some interesting issues that I'm going to look into in the next few months in an aquaduct study; first, there are houses behind the tank that are using this water, and I think that they're using it for irrigation and cattle (which is a HUGE waste of water); second, the system wasn't designed to take vital things (like pressure and friction) into mind, so the distribution of water in my town is uneven; third, the aquaduct committee is still disfunctional (shocker, I know) and clearly hasn't done repairs on the line for quite a while, as my Mom got to witness when we went up to the toma to repair a tube. As a result, water is escaping all over the line. I need to assemble and conduct a huge aquaduct study to investigate what the problems are exactly, but those are the things that have come up thus far.

Other than that, I have another conference that starts on Sunday that I'm bringing one of my counterparts to. I'm bringing a woman, Isela, that is the head of the burgeoning women's cooperative. Hopefully it'll get off the ground, but if not, I think that this women has the potential to be the next dirigente (mayor, basically) of my town. She's a little firecracker, so I'm excited to see how she handles this conference.

One final note, thank you to my parents for coming down and pampering me and visiting my site. It was hard for me to adjust, but I was really happy to see you and get to spend time with you. I love you both so much!

Alright! Back to site!

Molly

P.S. I just got a new chip for my camera (my old one had a virus) so I'll start taking pictures again. Sorry for the shortage!