My Life is Crazy.

For the past four days, I have spent hours asking favors and questions of complete strangers, many of whom have families and lives and for no explicable reason should be conversing with some 18-year-old foreigner like a peer or coworker. I invited myself into people's communities and homes, asking them to feed me three meals a day and bathing myself with their bucket water. I wouldn't have trusted me if I were any of the people whose houses I slept in this week!

Words I have thought of to describe survey: long, nerve-wracking, empowering, emotional, exhilarating. I can't quite find a word or emotion to describe the being shoved off a bus in an area you've never visited, slinging your backpack, sleeping bag and cot over your shoulder and blindly searching for one or two people in a 300-family community that may or may not actually know you're coming. To spend the night in their house. I always found what I was looking for within a few minutes, insanely enough.

Also worth noting: I get to hang out in awesome communities this summer. They are all so different and interesting and stunningly beautiful.

After a week of cold bucket showers and beans & rice three meals a day and the ten thousand bugs swarming around inside my mosquito net and holding the latrine door shut while simultaneously trying to wipe myself and not let my butt touch the toilet seat in the pitch black of night (rarely a success, FYI), I was ready to come home on Friday afternoon to exchange stories with the rest of staff, relax a bit, and rejuvenate for the coming weeks. But, since my return, shit has hit the fan, as they say. Unexpected complications have led to a lot of extra work--I'll be overseeing five communities this summer and up to 12 volunteers rather than the anticipated 9. Between Friday and yesterday, I spent 15+ hours on the computer typing up all of the information I collected on survey and translating it into Spanish. Tonight, I have to go back to one of the communities I visited last week and spend the night again because I found a bat in the room I slept in which deems it unacceptable for volunteer housing. In addition, all of the 2-day volunteer training has to be planned today. It's so strange to be completing assignments and meeting deadlines and stressing out over things, but I'm pretty much okay with it. We're all supporting each other and keeping each other calm (well, everyone else is keeping me calm-- I don't know how much I'm doing for them!) and we always find time to cook together and tell crazy stories and laugh a LOT. :)

So they say it only gets easier from here. I can only hope it's true! I'm super lucky and glad to have such a fantastic and energetic group of coworkers, and I can't wait until the volunteers get here on June 28th-- when the summer REALLY starts!!