This is a copy from the yearly budget, which shows money for one of our projects. We were pretty darn excited.......still are.All fun and no work………
I know that to some, well, maybe all of you out there looking at our blog, it looks as though we are having a heck of a lot of fun and not really doing anything constructive for the people that live here. We are having a good bit of fun however the truth of the matter is that we are helping people it is just that the time frame for getting things accomplished here is ridiculously slow. I would love to write blogs about how Anna and I research why fecal coliforms are so bad for you and why chlorine is measured in milligrams per deci-liter, but I don’t much like reading about such things and I am definitely not going to put you, the reader, through such a miserable read. Hell, I can hardly write well in English let alone the subject of diarrhea and why it happens. No, we like to write about our fun times and we realize that we should be telling you all that we are getting some good things done here in our hot mosquito infested nook of the world with your hard earned tax dollars.
I know that to some, well, maybe all of you out there looking at our blog, it looks as though we are having a heck of a lot of fun and not really doing anything constructive for the people that live here. We are having a good bit of fun however the truth of the matter is that we are helping people it is just that the time frame for getting things accomplished here is ridiculously slow. I would love to write blogs about how Anna and I research why fecal coliforms are so bad for you and why chlorine is measured in milligrams per deci-liter, but I don’t much like reading about such things and I am definitely not going to put you, the reader, through such a miserable read. Hell, I can hardly write well in English let alone the subject of diarrhea and why it happens. No, we like to write about our fun times and we realize that we should be telling you all that we are getting some good things done here in our hot mosquito infested nook of the world with your hard earned tax dollars.
We are very used to things being accomplished at breakneck speed in America, ordering food, high speed internet (good lord do I miss that), driving, shopping, having babies (well I guess that is nine months everywhere) actually I think this fast pace thing is a bit of a problem back home, this whole idea of “I want results and I want them now”. What they would say here is “tranquilo, no mas” which basically means, relax dude, it’ll get done. I want “results” for this country, kids are sick, old folks are sick, obesity, cancer and diabetes are major problems and I want these things dealt with ahorita, but trying to get things done very quickly here is just not possible.
We have been in our site now for almost eight months and we just got our first (major) project pushed through. Anna and I gave a presentation to all the OTB’s (basically town representatives, there are 26 “towns” in our “county”) on the need for a water testing laboratory in which water quality would be tested by this “county” and not a town forty miles away and that doesn’t give us the results until a month later. The OTB’s loved us (I just held up our laptop - they thought that was pretty funny - in a small room of twenty odd people and Anna read the slides) and the plan and approved the project and presented there approval to the mayor. The next thing we know is that the mayor has given us two thousand dollars to fund the lab, almost 45% of the cost of the entire project. We were so stoked!!! Anna and I were amazed usually things like this take the entire two years of a volunteers peace corps service to get done.
More details to come!
2 comments:
that's awesome. yay clean water!
yes, clean water is awesome, now if we can just get the rest of the funding!
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