The last month was spent mostly finishing my house. Killing pigs, cutting down virgin rainforest, that sort of thing. When I wasn't losing karma points, I was making those points back. I had a lot of good meetings about what my time here will mean.
My boss came out to visit. He came with a group called Waterlines which funded the aqueduct in my community. We gave them a tour and discussed things we would do differently and the extremely important and much harder social side of development work. Building capacity within the community is the difference between a water system that works and one that does not.
I had a good meeting with my community. I discussed potential projects while I'm here, reiterated that I'm not here to gift things to people, and implemented a photo policy to keep my photography commitments to community members to a minimum. Hopefully, the cries of "saca mi foto" will die down shortly.
Jon and I had a good meeting with his community. We restructured his dysfunctional water committee in an attempt to actually get people out to work days to finish construction. We painted a picture (literally) of remaining work in an attempt to motivate and show that we have A LOT left to do.
Jon and I have also started touring to other communities to work with them on that capacity building thing I mentioned earlier. I think it will be good. We'll have monthly meetings with their aqueduct committees so that they can start improving their systems. In a lot of cases, $100 and some sweat will drastically improve existing water systems out here.
All in all, I'm feeling more and more like a volunteer. I'm getting traction. People are starting to listen. I'm imparting knowledge, using that engineering degree for something. I feel good about where things are headed.
