June
20th
I've
been back in village for the better part of a week, but I still feel
like I have yet to get back into the swing of my life here. Makes
sense, I spent 2 days cleaning, 1 day with visitors, 1 day preparing
for more visitors, and today waiting for visitors who eventually
showed up. I've got this nice impressive list of stuff I want to
accomplish in the next 5 months, so feeling like I'm sitting around
doing nothing is making me a little nervous, especially considering I
want to leave site again in less than 2 weeks.
The
main village event today was the start of a campaign to identify
malnourished kids. I didn't go help, ostensibly because I was
preparing for my visit by Justin for site development, but he was so
late I easily could have gone. I'm admittedly kind of burned out on
the door to door campaigns. I feel obligated to go and help the ASCs,
particularly after they helped me with the schools for free, but I
now truly understand the absolute need for “motivation” money.
It's not that they're unwilling to do the work for free, or don't
understand how important and necessary the work is. It's that these
campaigns are boring, hard, thankless tasks that have to be done.
Knowing there's a reward at the end keeps people at least feeling
obligated to come and help every time the call goes out for yet
another campaign of some type, particularly during the rainy season
when all they want is to be in their fields to ensure they can eat
next year. I guess I've started shifting myself more into the
paperwork and prep-work part of the campaigns so that I'm still
helping in some way, but I do feel a bit guilty for avoiding the part
that involves getting up early and biking long distances and having
children cry when they see me.
In
the afternoon we had my site development meeting at the Mayor's
office, only starting 2 hours later than planned. I was nervous
because I honestly didn't work with (or even know) the majority of
the people who showed up, but they seemed to be saying good things
about me, which was encouraging. Justin presented his points in Moore
about community responsibility, that the PCV is like a flashlight
that the village needs to guide to illuminate the path they chose to
travel, and we signed some paperwork saying that the house I live in
will be available for the next PCV as well. I don't really think they
got too much out of it besides a forum to clear up that the next PCV
will be health, and after that they can request another sector. But I
assured Justin that I have big plans for making the next PCV feel
welcome and hit the ground running, and I'm excited to work on that
with my staff and CoGes.
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