Up Up and Away!

We are leaving the main training center tomorrow and heading off to a little aldea where us PAMers will have field based training. I´m going to be moving in with a new family. I haven´t met them yet but I heard there are five kids, two adults, and a little store all inside the house. Goodbye quiet life. I´m hoping that I´ll be so innundated with Spanish that my language skills will shoot through the roof! (or at least bump up a little bit)

This past week I traveled four hours north to the booming metropolis of Santa Barabara. After watching the final world cup game projected on the wall of a sketchy bar, I rode out to the campo with a real-life PCV. Her site was a bit bigger than most PAM sights, maybe 1-2,000 people living in the community. Some of the houses had running water and occational electricity, but the outlying houses were a little more simple. We visited a few families that didn´t have latrines and took pictures of their houses to put in a grant proposal that the PCV is working on.

We also brought some powered formula to a baby that was dying of malnutrition. The baby was 40 days old and seriously underweight. His legs looked like toothpicks, his stomach was sunken in, and his skin was a greyish color. While we were feeding the baby the formula, he stopped moving suddenly, and I thought he had died. Fortunately, we were able to get him to come back around. The situation was interesting and very sad. The mom is 40 years old, and isn´t producing any milk to feed the baby. They said they didn´t have any money to buy formula, but they had a huge stereo system in their house. With my level of Spanish, I definitely could have misinterpreted the situation, but the volunteer told me that the mom seemed totally unconcerned about the health of the baby. She already has four other children, and maybe keeping this new baby alive wasn´t a priority. Hope he makes it.

The volunteer and I talked a lot about the projects she has tried to start. She´s working on a trash collection service, since most of the trash goes into the river or is burned right now. In the next few months they will be starting a monthly collection service to take the trash into nearby Santa Barbara. The basurero is just an open air dump, but the community has decided it´s better to haul the trash their than to keep disperse it in the air and the water.

Okay, that´s all for the moment. Hope you all are doing well.

Cheers,

Ruth