Day by Day

This is probably the first time in my life that I’ve been content to take life one day at a time. Most of my control-freakiness has been (almost) entirely swept away by the simple fact that everything is out of my control! I don’t get to choose where I live or what my projects are, and I don’t have nearly enough knowledge to make an informed decision about those things anyway!

Here’s the dry version: We split our time between two communities, a large city we refer to as our Seminar-Based Training (SBT) site, and a tiny town we refer to as our Community-Based Training (CBT) site. The vast majority of our time is spent at CBT, where a group of six of us spend mornings learning language, and afternoons interviewing our artisan and formulating action plans. Right now I'm working on a product development project, to help our artisan make picture frames that are more appealing to Western tourists (see left). At night we go home to individual host families in order to practice our language further and get a bit of sleep. At SBT all thirty-eight of us live in one place, and attend seminars on health, security and technical training for ten hours a day.

Here’s the fun version!: Imagine everything I described above with a lot of crazy tangents thrown in! We eat candy for breakfast! I'm not kidding! Our current passion is learning the Michael Jackson Thriller dance. I’m not kidding. We’re pretty good. Beat It is next. We also spend a lot of time killing flies, avoiding wasps, recounting dreams, eating candy bars, and listening to Christmas music (Mariah Carey’s cover of All I Want for Christmas is You in particular).

Right now I’m also a little worried about my family. Due to the catastrophic fires in Southern California my aunt and uncle were evacuated from San Elijo Hills, which is near Carlsbad in northern San Diego. They are safe and sound at their best friends’ house in Orange County, but I didn’t find out until a couple days ago. My mom and grandma are safe and sound because they’re nearer to the coast and closer to the city proper. My cousins east of L.A. are also safe, according to the last news I received. But there are also hundreds of thousands of people who are scared and displaced, and many who have lost so much. My heart goes out to my hometown. Thanks to everyone who inquired about my family. I’m so isolated here that I actually wouldn’t have known about the fires if you all hadn’t shown your concern. Shukran bzzaf! And lots of love, too.