Blog #5 "When it Rains it Pours"

Blog #5

11/8/2011

“When it Rains, it Pours”

So the title may make it seem like things are bad in general but they’re not. It’s just a true statement for today. Last night I was woken up a couple of times by how hard it was raining. I’d roll over and go back to sleep…until at 3:30 in the morning I felt water dripping on my forehead. I sat up, dazed, wondering how I could lay down in some way to not be bothered by the rain so that I could sleep and deal with it in the morning. Just then, part of my ceiling (which is made out of some kind of board that’s thicker than cardboard and kind of looks like the material of a thumb-tack board) gave and a lot of water came down right onto the bed where I was just laying.

So I got up, moved the bed, grabbed a bucket, dried the mattress, changed sheets, and then went back to sleep for another hour or so...kind of anyway. Now I have the fun task of getting my ceiling and/or actual roof fixed today or tomorrow. I knew coming into this the ceiling looked suspect in a few places, but I guess I thought it wouldn’t happen. Anyway, this is really nothing. Just last month I met a Volunteer who is about to finish up, but in her first month at site a couple of years ago she actually fell into her latrine. The floor broke because it wasn’t built correctly in the first place and she fell into her latrine. Think about that for a minute but not in too much detail. She has a great story now but that’s a pretty bad situation to be in and for some people experiences like that during the first few months “alone” seem amplified and all compounded anyway, so for some people it could have seemed like the right sign to go home. Little things like my roof leaking are really not even enough to make me angry. It’s actually refreshing to have things like that or like losing some food that I thought was safe to a rat or the ants happen and my reaction be all about how to fix it and what to do differently rather than think about coming home.

For other site stuff, I’m in the midst of starting my Community Diagnostic Survey, which is a site overview and report to help new PCVs get integrated quickly. It requires meeting with local officials and with different recognized committees in the community. The main idea is to summarize the different needs and assets of the community as objectively as possible by gaining perspective from a good cross-section of the population. The results should help lead to project ideas too and keep us from subconsciously pushing our own agendas and ideas when coming up with projects. I’m excited to meet with different groups of people and to see how they view their community.

In-Service Training (IST) is coming up in the middle of December. It will be the first time that a lot of us see each other since PST. We’re trying to plan some cool vacation stuff afterward, so I might be going north to Nosy Be (pronounced Noo-see Bay). Traveling is still super-expensive on the PCV budget, especially if we need to fly, so we’ll see how it works out, but something like a week to a week and a half shouldn’t be too bad.

A few recent photos…

The part of the ceiling

Here’s a couple of photos of bats. I’m not really bothered by them, but this one was in my shower during the day because I’d left the door open all night. Every time I went to wash my hands at the tippy tap or went to grab something, he swooped at my head repeatedly. You’d think the sonar would at least tell him to avoid the giant thing in the room.

This photo is kind of funny. He looks like he has an afro, and it’s because he’s been electrocuted. He’s hanging from an electrical wire! It’s just like a cartoon or something. We just knocked him right down.

A better photo of that train wreck…

Here’s some fresh vanilla! There’s vanilla, cinnamon, and of course all kinds of fruit.

This is really common, unfortunately. Slash-and-burn at its finest…

That’s a new laptop sticker from RANO HP. It’s really a sticker people put on their houses to show that they are progressing and now use latrines.

Okay, that’s it. Hope to have cool updates next time, especially since the main infrastructure for the new water supply project is being implemented this month.