Peace Corps 50th Anniversary

This past March marked Peace Corps' 50th Anniversary and we've been celebrating the anniversary in different small ways throughout the year.  Because of significant budget cuts, we were not able to have an all-volunteer conference to celebrate, but instead did regional celebrations and invited our counterpart teachers.  This past Saturday was our celebration and I was in charge of organizing it because I am the volunteer rep in Boaco.  One of my sitemates (Liz) was coordinating things with me and we took on a great task.  I was certainly thankful that the "celebration" was finally over, even though I'm still crunching numbers to submit the final budget and writing up a report about it.  The event went really well and the counterpart teachers seemed to have a good time.  I barely ate any lunch at the event because I was so nervous/anxious about everything going smoothly.  We did it though and we got lots of compliments.  I feel good about it.  It's nice to be able to share with host country nationals what Peace Corps really is about.  The counterpart teachers also seemed proud of their work with the PCVs so that was special :)

Frank was here over the weekend so that made some of the stress melt away.  He came over Friday afternoon after dropping his brother and friend off at the airport.  We made tomato basil bisque (it was the canned variety from Costco hehe), garlic butter rolls, and of course Mojitos :)  He was exhausted from the week with visitors and I was exhausted from all my classes so we just relaxed.  We also made choco-bananas for dessert which was fun.  Those are pretty popular here, except they call them choco-bananOs (not sure exactly why they call bananas, bananos…I’ve heard that it has something to do with plantain bananas which are called platanos).

Anyway, Frank and I had a great time together this weekend, catching up—I got to hear some fun stories from the week.  We even played a couple games of cribbage and Frank beat me once.  Yikes!  I gotta practice!  It will be fun when my family comes to visit—maybe we can have a little cribbage tournament haha 

I sent Frank off this afternoon and sweated all the way home in the extreme noon sun.  Fortunately we got some rain a little later and it’s cooled down.  Now I have some work to do to prepare for the week.  I have my lessons planned with my counterparts so that’s good.  I have some things for my adult community class, but I still need to plan for the kids class.  And then there’s the matter of organizing all the information from the celebration (budget, write-up, photos, etc.).  I’m not really stressing though because one of my counterparts will be in Managua for meetings this week so I won’t have those classes to go to.  I have a workshop this Saturday with Andrea, but it’s going to be pretty chill.  We’re going to do some classroom materials demonstrations and give time for teachers to make their own materials.  I’m excited for it :)