I’ve gotten a lot of emails from you recently about what I actually do on a day-to-day basis, so here is what I did on Monday, April 27, 2009
- 8 am: Brandy, my 7 year old neighbor shows up. I brew us a pot of coffee and we sit on the front porch and share my breakfast of pan y café (bread and coffee)
- 8:30 am: There are now 5 kids on my front porch playing card games. I ignore them and read my book, “The Canterbury Tales”
- 9:30 am: I force all of the kids to leave except for Brandy. It’s time for our tutoring session. Today we work on writing the alphabet and saying the correct letters.
- 10:15 am: Brandy leaves and Leo arrives. It’s time for his tutoring session, and we work on reading words with the “ch” sound.
- 10:30 am: The lights go out. No big deal, except now the water in my refrigerator won’t be as cold as I would like.
- 10:45 am: sweep and mop the house. The kids return immediately after the house is clean to color in my coloring books. My house now needs to be swept and mopped again.
- 11:30 am: time to eat! Take out the rice and guandules from the fridge. Mix that with a salad of lettuce, tomato, bacon bits (thanks mom!) and oil and vinegar, and it’s “a buen tiempo.”
- Noon: wash dishes immediately after eating so that the ants won’t swarm my kitchen
- 12:30 pm: Nancy, my 13-year-old neighbor, comes to visit and chat. We sit on the front porch and discuss why she didn’t go to school today (headache) as we eat honey straight from the honeycomb.
- 2 pm: It’s time to make the rounds. I walk down the street to visit Manolo and his family. I help him and his wife shell guandules for tomorrow’s lunch, and as a thank you they give me some to cook tomorrow.
- 2:50 pm: Rachele, another volunteer, calls me to plan out her next Escojo meeting. We decide that STDs and HIV/AIDS is a lot of information for one 1-hour lecture, but neither one of us wants to break up the information and teach an extra class. So we both decide to just cram it all into one hour. I’ll let you know how that goes.
- 3:30 pm: Walking home from Manolo’s, I see about 6 of my Escojo kids sitting outside. I go sit with them.
- 3:45 pm: Trenita, another volunteer, calls me. She has to give a lecture on conflict resolution at the next Escojo regional conference, and needs some real-life conflict scenarios. She decides to use two from my group (our little fundraising problem and my catty teenage girls who always arrive late to my meetings). It’s a good thing my Escojo group is very conflicted so that I could help her out so easily.
- 4 pm: I go play dominoes with the old people of the neighborhood. I lose.
- 5 pm: I go visit Mingo and his wife Alessandra. They sell cleaning and bath products, and I want to buy a bar of soap. But they don’t have anymore, and I’ll have to wait for the next shipment to come in.
- 5:30 pm: I go visit Sofia (
- 6:15 pm: I go to the colmado to buy 1 pound of sugar (to make coffee tomorrow morning), and to refill my 50-gallon botellón of water. This costs 50 pesos (about 2 US dollars). Frank, the 13-year-old son of the colmado owner, mopeds the water over to my house. (I bet y’all didn’t know that I could turn moped into a verb).
- 6:45 pm: Dinner is peanut butter and crackers. Yum!
- :00 pm: The lights come back on! Shut the front door and hide out in my back bedroom so that I can actually get some work done. Get ready for my English graduation party tomorrow. Write the student’s names on their certificates, and write their final exam.
- 7:30 pm: Finished with work for my English class. Now start studying for Wednesday’s lecture on sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS.
- 8 pm: Try to de-clog my shower drain by pouring boiling water down it. This does not work.
- 8:10 pm: The lights go out. Listen to music and type this journal entry on my computer until the battery dies.
- 9 pm: Double check that the doors and windows are locked and that the gas tank is turned off. Go to bed, say my prayers, and try to sleep without a fan in this sweltering heat.
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