18/April/2010

The weather is really changing! The rainy season is ACTUALLY coming, seemingly a little bit early. During Holy Week, the temperature peaked, and after that, came down a few degrees, and there’s actually clouds in the sky now! Our last rain was November 14th, and since then, it’s been completely clear skies and hovering around 100 degrees. There’s no water, and often times they shut off the water to our homes without notice. On any random day we can lose water from 4-8 hours during the day. You don’t realize how agitating that is, until you’ve experienced it. That means no showering, no washing your dishes, no laundry, no washing your hands…nothing! Now that I feel the rain coming, I’m so excited! Clean water is a precious resource, and if you pick up the new April National Geographic, you’ll read all the fascinating and frightening articles and pictures of water all over the world. I hope it’ll change the way you think, and conserve water. Maybe give a military shower a try (turning off the shower while you lather, turning it back on to rinse)!

I just got back from a super po dunk town actually not too far away from where I live. The thing is, it’s SUCH a remote place, there’s almost no transportation whatsoever to get there. I’d like to go more often, but I think the transport issue will keep me from going. There’s an Agriculture volunteer that lives and works there, and I went with her to unload all the bricks and materials to build more efficient stoves out there. It was really cool to see a project completely different from anything I’ll ever do in my program. I may try to go there again in the next week after school to learn how to build the stoves and help out. I spent the night there last night because there was no way out til this morning. It was actually quite nice sleeping in the cool outdoors in a hammock.




Here’s the world map the Agriculture volunteer made in her town, and what I hope to do soon (although I may have to wait until after the rainy season depending on how bad it its).