usted no tiene salda suficiente....

The last month of work has been a hectic mix of phone calls, trips, meetings, excel spreadsheets and more meetings. At times I've been exhausted and frustrated, but the mere fact that I can make phone calls, set up and attend meetings and just sort of generally deal with things, independently and in Spanish, makes me happy beyond reason. Recharging my cell every 3 days is a pain, but having my days full of conversations and meetings is amazing. I go to the municipality. I go to schools. I go to community assemblies. I go to chicherias to talk to community presidents about their switch to organic agriculture. I like it.

The project that I was previously doing surveys for in Yanahuara has hit a major block, in that we lost the donation that was going to supplement the crops grown by the school with other food needed to constitute healthy school lunches. On a personal level, this broke my heart a little bit, as I had been spending so much time in the community and wanted to badly to be able to build with them something concrete.To maintain good relations and also because we love working there, Yasmine and I offered to run a little camp for the kids at the end of school, something fun for them and for us. The school loved the idea, and also asked us to teach some English, so all this week Yasmine and I spent full days at the school playing english Bingo and Simon Says. I have friends from Korea to thank for a slightly less gruesome modification of Hangman (where a poor guy falls off a cliff, slowly descending into the jaws of a waiting alligator) which was the week's hit. 

As to the issue of school lunches, I had been trying for a week to contact the manager at one of Urubamba's most expensive hotels, to follow up on a co-worker's meetings and see if the hotel could help us out with monthly donations of food. On Thursday I finally just went to the hotel, and after fifteen minutes of discussion with the security officer, was led towards her office. Our meeting was brief, but she agreed that the hotel could help and told me to come back in January, after consulting our nutritionist, with a list of the foods needed and she would supply them. Success!