Well the last few weeks have been very tranquillo here in my
community. Mainly due to the fact that
it is too hot and no one wants to actually do anything. Every day so far this month has been over 100
degrees! My schedule pretty much just
involves getting up early and going for about an hour walk in my community and
just saying hello to everyone, coming back and sitting under the shade tree for
the rest of the day with my host family.
I have also been spending some time on Google Earth looking at my
community and how it has changed over the years, the last picture was taken in
2009 and even since then there have been a lot of changes. I have also been working on getting my
interviews ready so I can begin those over the next couple of weeks once I get
PC to look over them and help me with my language.
I have an interview written up for the teachers at my school
so I can see who is interested in working with me and what types of things they
might be interested in me helping with.
My big project for this school year is going to be getting the school
garden cleaned up and running again. I
also have another questionnaire that I will be going over with all of the
students in my school to get to know them as well as to just get a baseline
about what they might already know about the environment/conservation so then I
can give them the same survey at the end of the year with the hopes that they
learned something! The last interview
that I have been working on is for every house in my community which is called
our community needs assessment to see what projects people are interested in
and what environmental problems they see with their community and what they
would like help with. School will be
starting for us around the 24th of this month if everything goes as
planned and I am anticipating working in the school 2-3 days per week. Also there is just one school in my community
for everyone and have different classes in the morning and afternoon. So if any of you teachers have any tips out
there for teaching in a school let me know because not only have I never taught
in a school before I will now be teaching in a different language, which I am a
little bit nervous about.
The other excitement that I have had a couple of weeks ago
right after my site presentation involved a wonderful little insect larva that
decided to call the ball of my left foot home.
I am not all that familiar with all of the wonderful insects and such
down here yet so for a few days it just looked like a blister so I was treating
it as such. Finally though I asked my
host mom about it because it just didn’t look right and it began to hurt pretty
bad. She doesn’t have the best eye site
for that sort of small object so she called her son over and he started
freaking out about it telling me that it is pique (a sort of flea) that lays
eggs in your foot and that usually they never get this big because they all
know what to look for (small black dot) and they usually remove it before it
gets too big. I had to remind him that I
am not familiar with such things and no one had ever told me about it. He was too freaked out to try and remove it
so we got the other older man that lives with us to take it out for me. Fortunately after about ten minutes digging
in my foot he was able to get it out but he used his knife that he carries with
him every day to do everything with but he assured me he had cleaned it that
day. I was just amazed at the size of
the flea larva and disgusted at the same time that it came out of my foot. I took some pictures of it once it was out so
you can see those below. So now that I
know what I am looking for I spend time every afternoon looking at my feet and
getting rid of them before they burrow into my foot because I would prefer to
not have to dig any more out.
Since we are in the middle of the summer right now we have
had some beautiful flowers in bloom, which you can see below. I have also begun to see many different
flocks of birds that are on their migration including many different
parrots. Other than that it has just
been very dry here and we have only really had one rain event the past few
weeks where we had a strong storm come up and dropped a lot of rain very fast
and then was gone again. I have been
enjoying everyone’s pictures of the snow and ice that you all have been getting
at home. I hope that you all have a
wonderful week and happy valentine’s day!
The wonderful larva I got out of my foot.
Some pictures of a wetland/grassland just outside of my community.
I think we might have a problem with erosion in my community.
A mother bird guarding her nest.
What all of the roads in my community look like most of the time about 6 in or so of very sandy soil, if I close my eyes and walk it feels like I'm on a beach just minus the cool breeze and water.
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