I apologize for not writing for some time. I don’t have any excuse except that I simply haven’t felt like writing. It is not like I have been very busy. These past few weeks have been quite boring actually. Since work slowed down for the holidays I haven’t had much to do except hang out with my fellow bored volunteers and read books. I read A LOT of books.
My birthday (December 21st) was pretty good. I am now 23 or, as I prefer to call it, on my second victory lap of 21. The night before my birthday, my fellow volunteers and I met up at a good seafood restaurant by the pier to hang out and speak English. We then stopped by a few bars before going to our favorite club in Machala where we met up with some Ecuadorian friends. The next morning my boyfriend (now ex…yeah, I know that was quick) took me to a nice lunch and then dropped me off to visit with a volunteer friend. We chatted for awhile and, not wanting to spend my birthday dinner by myself, I invited her over for fajitas and a movie. She accepted and we happily pigged out on fajitas and watched Forgetting Sarah Marshal.
Christmas was a bit more difficult to get through. My opinion is that birthdays are supposed to be celebrated with friends, but Christmas is always a family occasion. I have always loved everything about Christmas and it was difficult to think about how I was missing out on all my favorite Christmas traditions back at home. Fortunately, however, I did manage to keep some traditions alive. For example, I love Christmas baking. Every year I enjoy making about 16 different types of Christmas bars and cookies at once and (to my parents’ chagrin) absolutely destroying the kitchen in the process. I will then make little assorted plates of the cookies to pass out to my friends. One volunteer was kind enough to let me use her stove for my cookie extravaganza since my campo oven (big pot with a rock in it on top of a stove) takes a lot long than normal to bake things. I then passed out plates of cookies to people in my site that have helped me throughout the past four months. Everyone was very pleased.
On Christmas Eve Day the same volunteer that lent me her stove wanted to throw a party for the disabled children in her neighborhood. She was hoping to make cookies with them and I offered to help her out. I recommended she make my Mom’s shortbread cookies because it is extremely simple, inexpensive, and I had plenty of cookie cutters and sprinkles sent to me from the States that she could use. In the end only one child showed up, but we still had lots of fun eating cookie dough, chatting with her old host family (the party was being held at their place because her place was too small), and trying to tolerate her 5-year old host sister (who is the biggest pain in the you-know-where that I have ever met!).
In the evening, all the volunteers met up at one of our houses for a Christmas Eve dinner. We ate, drank wine, talked, commiserated, and ate some more. It was nice to know that I wasn’t the only one desperately missing home. It was a lot of fun, and since none of us had plans for Christmas Day, we decided to meet up again the next day.
I woke up Christmas morning and opened the presents that my family had sent me a few weeks ago and I somehow had managed to resist opening. I then decided to make the Christmas muffins that my family and I eat every Christmas Day. They turned out really good and baked relatively quickly in my campo oven. I then went to visit my old host family. I chatted with them for awhile and then hopped a bus to go to the same volunteer’s house that we had met at before. I then spent the rest of the day eating, drinking, watching movies, and basically being completely lazy.
I spent the next several days doing little besides reading and trying to escape the oppressive heat. Then on December 30, I took a 3 hour bus ride to Cuenca where I met up with the two women from my Spanish training class. One of them lives in Cuenca and the other lives in a remote town about 5 hours from Cuenca but goes there frequently to get her mail. It was great fun to hang out with them. We are so very different in both personality and age that it I would be hard-pressed to think of a situation in which we would have the opportunity to become friends besides Peace Corps, but we got along great and had a lovely time visiting with each other. The one that lives in Cuenca was a beautiful apartment and hot running water. I definitely took advantage of that perk!
New Years Eve wasn’t too exciting. We met up with another volunteer and went to the center of Cuenca to see what could be seen. We were kinda disappointed with the celebrations. It is an Ecuadorian New Years tradition to burn effigies that are supposed to represent the old year. But after seeing a few effigies burn, it got dull pretty fast. Since two of the volunteers that I was with were older than my parents, we didn’t exactly want to go to some club (besides… we were broke), so we ended up returning home right after midnight. I wasn’t too disappointed. It was really cold outside and the change in altitude was making me sleepy.
On New Years Day, the volunteer that lives 5 hours outside of Cuenca returned to my site with me. She stayed here for a few days. I showed her around my site and Machala, introduced her to my old host family and some other Ecuadorian friends, and cooked us healthy food (we both resolved to be healthier/eat better). She like my site a lot, but did not handle the heat very well. That does take some getting used to.
Today was the first day back to work. Determined to actually do something in my two years here, I went to the librarian and told her that I want to start a reading program in the library. I have some great manuals about staring such a program that a previous volunteer had written after starting a very successful reading program a few years ago. I showed the manuals to the librarian and tried to start actually planning how to begin the program. It was difficult because the libraian got side-tracked very easily and I kept trying to get her to focus on the task at hand. We ended up deciding to have a meeting with the leaders of the community next week to discuss such a program. I then had us plan of what we will discuss at the meeting in an effort to focus her and ensure that we accomplish something. I hope this is successful. Kids don’t read here so there is every probability that this reading program will fail. Still, I’m bored and am tired a not doing anything. This should, at least, keep me occupied.
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