Thursday, May 28, 2009

Crazy Week

So my family is coming to visit this week!

Of course everything at work decided to pick up, so I had a crazy busy week. Starting last Friday, I had the COMUDE meeting, which is kind of like a great big town hall meeting. It was productive, so that was nice.

On Saturday, I hosted my music radio show for the second time. I barely screwed up this time, much smoother than the first time. It was all going well, until the lights went out. They came right back, but it took the PC a good 3-4 mins to boot up. The FM broadcaster however, came right back online. This meant we were on the air, but without music. What did I do in this case? After apologizing profusely for our ¨slight technical difficulties¨ I began to tell stories. That´s right, about where I grew up, how I learned Spanish, how long I was going to be in my town, etc. This luckily kept the listeners occupied, and before I knew it, the music was back on. Like I said, a smooth show give or take. We listened to Reggae and Reggaeton, and we had 5! callers call-in to reqest songs. However, almost without fail, they wanted songs either a) I didn´t have or b) I didn´t want to play. Also, even though I repeated it every five minutes, people kept asking for songs of other genres, even after I specifically said, ¨Tonight we will only be listening to Reggae and Reggaeton.¨ People still kept calling asking for their favorite banda songs. ugh.

On Sunday, I went on what ended up being a 4 hour hike, which we were told took half an hour there and a half hour back. In our defense we did a fair amount of sightseeing before hand, but my sitemate was looking for a school in one of our outlying villages. We decided to walk even though it almost always rains in the afternoons. We threw caution into the wind and hit the road with our rain jackets and umbrellas.

After an hour of walking and severely missing the fork in the road we had to take to get to the school, we decided to turn around and ask for directions. After getting on the right path, we then came to a river, which we had to cross. We didn´t want to get our feet wet, so we decided to walk the LONG way around. (after returning to town, a friend said, why didn´t you just take your shoes off to cross? - DUH!)

Anyways, it had been raining the past few days and the river, while not quite white water, looked a bit strong. As soon as we started walking however, we saw a pickup begin to cross the river. At this point we were out of shouting range, and miserably continued our path. There was one last crazy steep hill to climb to get to the school, and then as soon as we got to it, surprise, it began to rain. Hard. And thunder some. Now I was the tallest thing around, so I was pretty worried.

And as for our shoes, they were totally, inexorably soaked. I think if we would have crossed the river on the way back they might have been drier, but what the heck, we took the long way around. I am please to report however, my Marmot Minimalist Goretex Jacket is 100% waterproof. That was a sage investment I made. When I got home, I was super tired, so I went to sleep. And I woke up to a crazy work week.

So on monday, I had a surprisingly busy day at work, with lots of meetings. One tuesday, I attended a Women´s group meeting, which are always interesting. Then on Wednesday was my super day. I had a meeting with a nutrition NGO who is trying to work in our community. I wanted them to give me info to say over the radio. I met them in the morning. Then I had to go get money and a pizza for lunch, since it was the Champions league final, and I was having some folks over. Barcelona won handily, and I ran to the top of the hill in town, where I had to begin my radio show right after the game.

I did my show, only blanked out like 3 times, (a marked improvement from the first week let me tell you) and actually ran out of time! We talked about the COMUDE meeting, the womens group meeting, some info on avoiding the H1N1 virus (pig flu) and finally disaster preparedness, in this case having to do with flooding. I should have done it on earthquakes because that night we had one.

After the radio show, I returned to work where I learned we had been challenged to play in a indoor soccer match by the environmental agency office in Huehue. We headed to the match, and I was goalie. I only let in 3 goals (Again, a marked improvement over last week) and got to use the goalie gloves I got a few weeks ago (great investment by the way!)

Then it was back to the house, to try and catch the NBA playoffs, which were supposed to be on TV. When we flipped to the sports channel however, the audio was working but the image was not. Add to that the fact the lights kept going out about 10 times an hour, and it made for a pretty interesting game. We made cheeseburgers and relaxed watching the game for short stretches. I went to sleep early, and then woke up early today to go to work. I got ready to head out because tomorrow I am picking up my family!!!