So...I realize I'm very behind on my blogging and I'm lucky that I can whip out and snap rediculous numbers of photos so that if you flip through all these pictures really fast you'd be watching a video. Really! Probably!Anyway, so here's a pretty list of what I've been up to:Project 1.) Working with my buddy Emily in organizing camps this Summer for the kids here. We're going to plan it a lot better so it will be sustainable after I leave. All the activities last Summer were organized and run by me, so we need to get people and organizations to take over and get volunteers from the city out to help.
(picture of Emily and I back in May, when we swore-in as volunteers, and group picture of me, kids, and the community librarian Mihaela)
Project#2: A volunteer named Mel who's a year ahead of me in Romania designed a cataloging system using Microsoft Access. I learned about this in November/December and had to take time to massage the idea that it would make life easier if we put bar code on things and could scan them. Reports would be easier too. So, this week Mel, Mihaela and I have been translating the whole program to Hungarian->English->Romanian and adapting reports. Yipes!
Project2.5: A previous project idea was to have a public computer lab...and then public computers...but due to lack of interest and funding from the administration the idea is still an idea.
(the community library and the kind Mihaela who's been soooo helpful to me for every project I've been working on. She's also a great help to the kids and will go over and beyond to help them out, the other picture is where we want our 3-4 computers to make this also the first public computer space)
So a baby died, a 1 month old baby died 3 weeks ago. I found out the next day the baby drank water from the wells in our village. I know they are high in nitrates...I've heard and I ran tests this Summer. It's called the "blue baby syndrome." What a shame that a life was lost for a cause that could have been avoided. I'm using this opportunity to start the local paper I've been trying! Sooo hard to get a local paper started! I don't know if people want this, but information needs to get around better here! (locally) Almost everyone here thinks that you can boil water and nitrates will oxidize or die like microorganisms, so,
Project#3: I've made fliers and after I gather a few more announcements and stories I'm going to start distributing and pushing for local paper thing to work!
(here's test strips I got from CCEG -a NGO ecological organization in Galati that I sort of work for now too. I am distributing them to people and asking them to come back to me with the results so I can sticker them on my:
project#4.) community map which will be displayed in the Mayor's office!. The baby drank water with 283ppm nitrates and US regulation states 5ppm as max and EU states 50ppm.)
(Babies are especially susceptible to nitrate poisoning under the age of 1, and it may cause brain growth retardation until age 2. It's still not probably healthy, but adults can drink it and be okay)
Project#5.) Here are Sorina and Lili, I connected them to create a partnership between Sorina's high school and Lili's primary school. Sorina is the keeper to a beautiful!! English book library!! With things like HP!! Black Beauty!! All sorts of beautiful books!!! Lili wanted to interest her students more...so she took the initiative and they both got together and I think the partnership will happen!! Hurray!! (That means English books may come here and I don't have to go all the way to Galati during High school class hours to check books out!)
I am also working with Lili and her new English Club to do,
project#6: webcam exchanges with Japanese kids. A former Cal Poly, and Trical volunteer, and Peace Corps volunteer is a JET volunteer right now in Japan. His name is Lyle and we got our groups to have their 2nd exchange and all of us coordinators felt that it went well. We wanted to encourage kids to use English and show them that it's not just a language American's and the English, Australians use, but it's a 2nd language used by many other countries to communicate with each other (like the common tongue in the Lord of the Rings, or Manderin in Chinese).
(Sorina, Lili with her English club's first meeting, books books BOOKS!)
I still hang out with kids and do fun projects with them once in a while; I do have a 1 hour English class/minons I command to do my bidding, every Tuesday evening. Before I left for Christmas I showed people how a "gingerbread" house could be made. I got kids to come help on Saturday and before school and we gave it to the teachers as a present and the kids got a group to carol too!
(I found food coloring!! and it took me weeks to do so, and I made icing which is crazy crazy stuff! It was hard, but not as hard as making pot stickers! The thing was build in secret: at school on Saturday, before school Tuesday at the commnity library with the librarian's help, and hidden in the Mayor's office's refrigerator to hide it from the teachers and rats, we presented it to the teachers Wednesday morning and the kids caroled).
Project#7, and I think the potential to be the biggest project: Here's the organization that does a lot of Ecological consulting and works very closely with my commune actually. I went with them on a road trip back in June, and now they got the funding for a project for Waste water and Solid waste "education and work group development" for 10 communes along the East coast of Romania, and it's a 1 year project. For now, my role is go down to Galati every Friday or so and see what I can help them with. Actually, the fact that I took so many environmental classes as part of my minor at Cal Poly, and the fact that I was an intern at the County Environmental Health Department in CA is useful here.
Austrians and Luxenbergians are helping to fund this project, and it's a lot of work....against a lot of mess and structered mindsets.
We have a lot of trash around my village too...this is another commune that's 2-3 away from mine. You guys saw the pictures of my sewage system...and you've seen pictures of my trash going up in flames....compost piles, recycling, reusing animal waste....there's a lot of educating/convincing to do.
(Look! I have a name tag!)
We had gone on site visits for the Austrians to take a look at what kind of work needs to be done, and then we got to work talking about how and what information, etc...need to be exchanged.
I was taking notes mostly and giving my knowledge of what I know about my commune: what kids do with trash, who recycles, who drinks from wells, population, etc...
(I got to stay at someone's home for the 2 day conference and I got free delicious meals!! I am putting on quite some due to the colder weather: biological urges to eat when cold, but it was I was able to contain myself! It was a really nice restaurant! and I ate there 3 times!)
Soooo that sums up what I'm working on...what I'd worked on, what I will be working on. There are small things here and there, but yes, I'll try to keep myself sane. I wanted to be busy, but I realize I'll be a better volunteer if I don't spread myself too thin.
I am still generally getting 9 hours of sleep a night (I know lots of you hate me after I've said that, but hey, I live in the country and it's Winter, what else am I supposed to do?).
Anyway, it is 2:48am our time and I need to get to bed. Good night!!
(probably not the full 9 hours tonight...)
p.s. Did you know that every entry I blog, is me working?
Project#8=> Peace Corps' mission#2 out of 3 = to share with Americans at home the culture, lifestyle, and etc...of my host country: Romania
