Thursday, August 10, 2006

Por fin

Hello again. It has been a while but I have had some time to get settled in and start to get some work going. I am living alone in my house and it has been a nice change. I am not exactly alone since my neighbors are very close and always stopping by but I can do as I please and I am cooking my own food which is nice. My house is by no means done. In true Terry form it is a work in progress and probably will be for two years. But it is livable. I am hoping to do some more work on it this coming week but I have said that many times (again in true Terry form). As far as work goes I have started teaching in one of the two schools in my community. They gave me the PE time which is 40mins once a week. Right now I am teaching dental health and I will be moving on to other topics such as nutrition, hygiene, and parasites prevention in the coming weeks. I am still working with the Water commissions that are trying to bring running water to the community. Right now there are two of them but my first goal is to get them to join so that it will be cheaper per house. They don't believe me yet but they will. I am hoping to start having talks about random health topics soon. There is one lady who is in the hospital right now because she had a attack related to her high blood pressure. That might be a good place to start. Here are some pictures of my site:

This is where me in my neighbors get our water from. It is a spring or ycuayvy in guarani. There aren't any amoebas here so it is relatively safe. I use a little bleach to treat my water each time I take a bucket out but none of my neighbors do and I drink at their houses almost everyday. Hopefully one of my future projects will be to build something to protect this
This is my house. It is one room 4m x 4m. The shack next to it is going to be my kitchen when I get a door on it and fix it up.

This is me in my latrine hole. It was really hard to dig this thing first of all because we are in the middle of a drought and the ground in dry and hard and also because after about 1.4m I hit rock. Luckily their is a guy in my town who looks for buried treasure (no joke) and he let me use his wrecking bar. That is the wrecking bar to my side.