In the last two weeks I was able to have a few meetings with the new mayor, and I finally know who my counterparts are! Last Thursday I had my general assembly with the community, which I had been stressing about since I got to my site. The purpose of the assembly is to introduce the new volunteer to the community, explain Peace Corps and what work the voluteer will do in the community. For the first month the volunteer is supposed to work with the counterpart in the mayor in getting to know the community and preparing for the assembly. I, however, didnt found out who my counterparts are until two days before my assembly. I had reserved a space in the town hall well in advance to have the assembly, and when I showed up that morning I discovered the room was filled with fertilizer. So then my counterparts and I had to find a new venue and clean it before people started showing up. To make things worse, the projecter I had reserved to use for my power point presentation had been given to the casa de la cultural for a film festival, so I had to do the whole presentation without my powerpoint. In spite of all this, it went pretty well. About half the people I invited showed up which was way more than I expected, my counterparts helped with the presentation, and I got some good feedback from the community members.
My computer stopped working last week, so I took it to a guy in town who owns a cyber cafe. I think he managed to save my documents, music and pics, but he had to redo all my programs and stuff using the software he has to fix it, so now everything on my computer is in Spanish....As if I wasn't bad enough with my computer before :)
