It’s been a while since I’ve posted, but now I’ve had a chance to work out some bugs with my security and things are back to normal at visforvanessa.com.
At the end of January I had the opportunity to attend a workshop with my counterpart on the subject of project design and management. It’s a workshop that’s given twice yearly here and is facilitated by PCVs and HCN counterparts. It was an interesting workshop and it gave more insight into the whole process of how to plan a project. I’m glad that I was able to attend, though I think it would have been nice to be able to go to this a little bit earlier in my service. During the workshop we plan a sample project with our counterpart, with the idea that this is probably not going to be a working plan- it’s an exercise to learn the process. The idea behind this is that we can’t plan for a community that’s not there to be involved. Unfortunately, my counterpart had a very difficult time understanding this. She’s a very action oriented woman and wants to do a lot of things, but sometimes in her haste to get things done she doesn’t always consider important factors such as the other people involved. I’ve been trying to stress that we all need to sit down as a group and plan what will happen at the school; supervisor, teachers and me. The problem is that with DepEd, things are often mandated by the higher ups and everyone is told to follow them- the idea of group planning is still a little foreign. Hopefully, though, this can be worked out and we can get a start on doing some actual projects at my school. So far I feel kind of like the book fairy who just keeps showing up with book donations, but doesn’t really do much else.
Between then and now I also had my first birthday in country. My regional manager came to visit me at my school and meet with the teachers. I took this as an opportunity to try and celebrate my birthday Filipino style, which means that you get up early and cook all day. I made american style spaghetti (which is “birthday food”) and not the usual sweet sauce, cucumber salad and baked cupcakes with my new oven. My counterpart also brought a delicious cake and my regional manager brought ice cream. All in all there was way too much food and I ended up eating leftover spaghetti for the rest of the week, but it was a good time. I’ve heard from other people who’ve had birthdays and said that people went to great lengths to celebrate for them, but I’m glad mine was low-key. People here generally want to go to great lengths to make you feel special and appreciated but my personality doesn’t deal so well with that, instead of feeling special I always feel like I’m inconveniencing everyone and that they don’t need to go to such great lengths to please me (especially when it mostly just makes me feel uncomfortable).
Birthday aside, things are going alright now. I was sick for most of last week, but I’m not sure what was wrong. I ended up going to the hospital for some tests that were inconclusive, so I was mostly on bed rest and a bland diet. Things seem to be going alright this week, and I guess that means I’m better. I haven’t really been sick in the time I’ve been here so far, so I guess I was due for a bug of some sort. Also, I’ve been trying to arrange things for my mom’s visit. She’ll be arriving soon and we’re going to do some traveling around the country. Needless to say, I’m more than a little bit excited The month of March is mostly spent testing the students, so I won’t be missing too much at site and we’ll get to see a little more of the country than I’ve been able to get to so far.