I left my fridge with some chopped veggies and fruit in the freezer. It's all in little tupperwares. I hope it survives the week until I get back. I also had a tupperware of some kind of new fruit (it's like a melon, green and a little spikey on the outside, green on the inside with a hard seed pod in the middle filled with lots of fleshy seeds, and starts with a "g"). It didn't taste as good as I hoped, and accidentally left it in the fridge. Eww. I don't want to think about it. Hopefully nothing will be able to get inside of the plastic container and make it really yucky.
Hmmm, in other news, as I said, I've got my dentist appt tomorrow. I started my meds today, but Lourdes (PC Medical Officer) had a full plate today, so I only started on the paperwork and she checked blood pressure, pulse, and weight. I feel like last week I was probably 10lbs lighter since I had no water in me. Oh well, at least I'm healthier now. And that's an improvement on when I had my tummy probs. (When it was hurting, I wouldn't want to eat anything, so I'd just have brownies or lemon cake or whatever I could bake and just read in my hammock or bed all day. Not the best diet and exercise plan!) I did some squats the other day as part of an exercise routine and man... I don't know if I was still dehydrated some, or just since I had stopped it for the week I was sick and a couple more days when i was out of my house, but geeze! My quads were still telling me about it today walking down the stairs in the bus terminal today.
Last week in site (well, weekend since I got back Friday afternoon), I chugged out lesson plans for 20 hours of training. I've got 12 more hours to come up with a plan for. (I forgot to tell our Programing and Training Specialist, Carlos, that I'm not going to do plans for the 8 other hours of Week 4, nor plans for Tech Week (Week 5) which is all day every day, or 40 hours more. Every hour of planning takes almost a full page of writing justifications, learning objectives and procedures. Once I cover all the trainings that I'll be personally facilitating, I'm gonna call it quits!
Plus, I'm putting together the training manual. While the Goal 1 guide for "environmental education in the schools" is pretty much done, we decided at our last meeting that instead of doing two separate guides, we'd do one big one with getting started, goal 1, and goal 2. That means that to make it easier in the long run to integrate everything, I've gotta pull out all the material from goal 1 and move it from Microsoft Publisher (which is a beginner's kind of publishing program that doesn't let you move things around easily) to Adobe InDesign (which is much easier to work with in that you can move chunks of documents around instead of page by page and update changes, like fonts and tables of contents, in the book all at once). Only problem is that I have to copy and paste everything from one to the other. And for our goal 2, "environmental action in the community," everyone is working on different parts of it, which they should be sending in April 9th. So it's kinda weird trying to set up the pages without knowing what I'm going to receive... and trying to start writing intros to each of the four objectives without having all the info that will be going into each section. Perhaps I'll take these days of my COS meds and hold off on the other work until my boss starts paying for me to be in the city instead of the med office. :)
It's weird talking to other PCVs who are COSing (close of service, aka leaving at the same time as me) as they are just chilling in their sites until they leave. I feel like it's getting to be crunch time with everything that's happening right now. Well, I'm not doing much in my site right now either. A guy was supposed to stop by my house for computer lessons so he can then take an air conditioning repair class through the national training center/institute that does all kinds of job training for rural Panamanians. I'll have to find him when I get back to site and ask him what happened. To his credit, I came back to site on Good Friday (so he was probably in church most of the day), then there was Saturday (which even if it's not a designated religious holiday, my people always celebrate every day for nine days before any religious day), and then Easter Sunday (which is about as churchy as things get in a Catholic community). When Kayla told me that there was a 5 hour mass on Thursday just leading up to Good Friday and Easter... I decided (seconded by Kayla) that i wasn't going to go near the church until it was all over as I didn't want to get sucked in and spend (is that bad of me?) all that time when I could be getting other things done.
I cleaned off my desk. That was a big improvement. And hung up all my clean clothes that I washed. We didn't have water Sat afternoon or all day Sunday, so I didn't wash the other clothes and sheets I had waiting. But I did put clean sheets on my bed. My kitchen is pretty clean too. I accidentally left a bag with two onions in my food storage bag (where I keep my dry goods like beans). It didn't do so well. I could have rescued them, as only the outside layer was bad... but with my tummy, I just chucked the onions to the skinny dogs and annoying chickens. Plus, onions are like $0.60/lb. I can afford new ones when I go back next week. :)
Speaking of which, Kayla's b-day is April 11th. So we're going to the beach for the night... and then that following morning, I'm supposed to catch a bus in Penonomé at 6am to get up to Chiguiri Arriba at 7am to kick off the medical gira. (The US Army is bringing doctors in to treat the people in my area, and I think veterinarians too. I'm going to be their translator. lol, I hardly know how to describe all the things that go wrong with me in Spanish, so it should be interesting. I can at least talk to my gente and ask enough questions to get to what I need to tell the docs. They just better not use their slang on me. aka, Women with a stomach ache is the polite way to say they are pregnant, etc. We'll see! I'm just hoping that some of the docs will be cute and around my age. Heck if there is a cute one, I might put in another week of translating with them in the next town they head to. lol!
Kathryn, one of the girls who attended my Culture Week in site last September, is coming to help out too. She's a good friend and is going to spend the night at my house for at least one night. We'll have a girls night, which I'm looking forward to. I just hope she doesn't pick Monday night... as I'll just be arriving back to my house after a week of being away, and it won't be pretty. I think I need the cleaning fairy to come through. (The two air mattresses that popped a while back are folded up in a corner in my bedroom, no doubt collecting some kind of mold. I don't know if I should just bury them, burn them, try to haul them out of my community to dump in Penonome, or give them to one of my neighbors to try to fix. Decisions...)
Hope that catches you up some!
