Ending The Year Right

Happy New Year!

Hi everyone, let me first say Happy Holidays and Happy New Year, I hope you all had a great one; myself, I can’t complain, both Christmas and New Year’s Eve were great. I’ll describe what went on in more detail later, but first let’s talk about what I’ve been doing since my last blog post, way back in October.

Out in my village things are going well, since last time when I was in the city I listed out all the program goals that I had, I have since started on some of them. The easiest one, giving English lessons I started not too long after I got back. I have class two days a week, on Mondays and Fridays, the location has changed 3 times since I started, with the location currently being one of the stores in the village. While not being the best location it works, I’m still looking for another and think I might have one picked, the local dance club on the island, I need to sort out the details with the owner, so we’ll see, just imagine it though. Every class for the most part I have different students, with one exception, one who comes to every class and is serious about learning, this is big. Since he wants to put the effort in it really is very motivating for me and keeps me encouraged. I imagine in due time I’ll pick up more who will be just as dedicated.

In an attempt to get the word out that I know something about electrical work I installed power in one of the captains’ houses. A while ago I took a look at his house and drew out a wiring diagram and made a material list of everything that he would need to wire his house, he eventually ended up picking up all the materials in the city (Paramaribo) and brought them back. Over three days we wired his house; it went smoothly and turned out very well, check out the photos I took. So far word has spread, I fixed one of the Gaanmans women’s houses, and one of the other captains’ house. We’ll see how this will go, I would like to eventually turn this into some type of workshop to teach the villages how to do this on their own since it’s really easy, there’s no construction code to follow!

Back in early November a team of 3 from UNICEF came out, 2 of which were Peace Corps volunteers who work in the UNICEF office. They’re working on a program called WASH which stands for Water and Sanitation Hygiene. It covers a very broad spectrum from simple hand washing hygiene to the implementation of water systems, pretty much anything that has to do with water. The program is in its infancy here, which means that currently the UNICEF team was just informing the village leaders of the program in the first place and that it wants to work with the village from the start in order to make this project work. We’ll see what happens, since village input is key the direction of the project can go anywhere.

Other than that I’ve been gearing up to prepare to start some of the other projects that I would like to do. And when I say “gearing up to prepare to start” I mean trying to get to some definitive starting point since what I’ve been at is just way to abstract to organize and once I do get an idea that has some substance I think of a way to improve it changing the original idea. By the time you hear from me again I’ll have this all sorted out, and then its full speed ahead.

As for general day to day life it’s going day by day. I started to take my boat out every day in the morning for about an hour to two, good times. When I first started to couldn’t steer the boat worth shit, but now I’ll take on anyone. We also got power; a crew came from the city and replaced the whole system, all the power poles and the wire. The old power poles were rotting and some had fallen over which meant no power until replaced. The funny thing was that the generator was almost brand new but couldn’t be run because of this; it was down for around 9 months. Now every evening we have power, the fuel lasts for around 2 months before it runs dry, and takes about 2 weeks to resupply. In early December it ran out and right before I came into the city we were resupplied just before I took off. And… other than that are the day to day happenings…you know…

Take a look below, I took several random photos and videos, some of the monkey that lives behind me, some of the airplane, some of some other stuff… I did get a new camera, so next post you’re going to see a ton of photos and videos all which will be quality.

Oh, and as for Christmas and New Years they were both great, both being some of the best I’ve had. For Christmas one of the volunteers had her family down here and was staying in another volunteers house who herself was in America for the holidays. She invited several of us to come have Christmas with her and her family, it couldn’t have been better, she did good, we even had fireworks! As for New Years, I and two other volunteers kicked it with some other American and Dutch people, forming what I like to call a fun mob. We rolled from place to place and without expressing any details I can tell you that we took advantage of what New Years in Paramaribo has to offer without a doubt.

One last thing, here’s a list of all the books I’ve read this year while in Peace Corps

The Cosmic Serpent – Jeremy Narby
Walden – Henry David Thoreau
The Burn – Vassily Aksyonov
The Saga of California: This Promised Land – Robert Olney Easton
The Coffee Trader – David Liss
Three Cups of Tea – Greg Mortenson
Invisible Monsters – Chuck Palahniuk
Night Sky – Robert Burnham
Into the Wild – Jon Krakauer
East of Eden – John Steinbeck
Culture Jam – Kalle Lasn
Mere Christianity – C.S. Lewis
Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
Mein Kampf – Adolf Hitler
The Riverbones – Andrew Westoll

Once again, Happy New Year! Here’s to 2011!