Obsessions

Things I'm obsessed with right now:

1. My plants: My plants are growing! The tomatoes are going crazy and I'm giving some away so that my community members can delight in glorious plants too. It means that I did my compost right, I'm using the recycled bottle planters, and I'm growing something we can eat!



2. Amazing kids: Some of the elementary schoolers called me up on their week off to meet up so we could work on preparing the school for a garden and making a soccer net. As an added bonus, we also got to play soccer one day and I taught them basketball the second day. I love these kids - they would be my gifted & talented special extra class if that was a real thing in this country.

3. Mindy Kaling: Just everything. I may have just spent most of my internet package watching interviews and panels with her. She's smart, funny, thoughtful, dedicated, witty, and just a fantastic example of an amazing and inspirational human being. The Mindy Project is my late-night Peace Corps go-to show, even though I'm all caught up, and I just read her book and love her even more for it. She's the kind of person I doubt I would be able to work with, and I absolutely would have no idea how to hold a conversation with, but I am endlessly grateful she's working and creating and generally just being the amazing woman she is.

4. On a similar note, Ike Barinholtz. I didn't think too much about Morgan as a character in the Mindy Project, but once I started watching interviews and panels with him, I realized how absolutely hilarious and incredible he is. Also the fact that the entire crew of the Mindy Project is just constantly making fun of Chris Messina and his accent.

5. Looking at international positions on the Peace Corps website while I pretend to study for the Foreign Service exam. Also reading Hillary Clinton's Hard Choices as I pretend to study for the exam. Also reading/watching John Green's Crash Course World History as I pretend to study for the exam. Basically, I am just doing things I enjoy and calling it studying, which probably will lead to me not passing the exam, but I realized that if I do pass I'll be in a real pickle because the oral interviews fall right in the middle of my traveling around Europe post-Peace Corps, which would be a really expensive interview if I have to fly back for it.



6. Super cool name bracelets and pens: They look a little like this but with super thin nylon thread in awesome colors and way more complicated designs. I'm too lazy to do them right now, but they are really cool. Really I just want to buy one from the people in Perquin, because they take an insanely long time to make and, as I said, I'm lazy. I'm making Edwin do the jewelry instead.

7. That feeling of accomplishment at finishing grant reports, camps and quarterly reports.

8. Meeting new and fascinating people without feeling totally superfluous to the conversation, superficial or uncomfortable. I'm not really good at small talk and I'm really not good at meeting new people, so this week has been a bit of an anomaly for me. I spent Easter weekend with some of my good friends and met a friend of a friend who is really cool, totally personable and awesomely confident. She's a jewelry designer, and was helping teach Emily's women new designs. I'm a sucker for anything crafty, so I was thrilled to jump in and take a stab at it in the shuttle, while listening to the stories and the banter. I learned a lot through observation and conversation, and her confidence and style can fill a room to bursting.
I spent a large part of Saturday night talking to a Peruvian professional living in Honduras in a mix of Spanish and English about everything from skiing in Colorado to capitalism and the free market economy to decriminalization of drugs to politics to education to women's rights to religion to surfing. It has been a long time since I have had to defend myself intellectually in a conversation, and it was amazing for me to make a statement and have it deconstructed and all of the holes in my thought process pointed out. It was a mental workout that left me more thoughtful, better informed and totally delighted.
On Easter Sunday night, in search of a fire over which to cook our s'mores, we ended up invited in to spend the evening with the neighbors of the hotel. They are a Salvadoran Catholic family from Cali who were on spring break. We had some great wine and cheese, played cards with the kids, and shared experiences and interests for hours.


9. Being inspired and challenged: Sometimes it comes from my projects, sometimes it's from Edwin getting jazzed about making bracelets, sometimes it's from being surrounded by amazing PCVs, sometimes it's from trying to make PC El Salvador a better post, sometimes it's from talking to staff, sometimes it's just the sun setting on my right and the red moon rising on my left and the entire ocean spread out in front of me.

Things that are not so hot:

1. Actually, being too hot. It kinda sucks to spend 22 hours every day sweating like a maniac even when I'm doing nothing more strenuous than swinging in the hammock. Welcome to summer in San Miguel.

2. The ants: It's that time of year when the adobe walls turn black as ants and flying ants pour out of every single orifice. I have a Raid can handy to spray the walls down, but then my room just smells like Raid, which also kinda sucks.

3. Chicken shit: I don't wear shoes at my house, mostly because it's hot and I didn't grow up wearing shoes inside, though inside is kind of a loose term when the floor is cement and the walls are adobe and the house is one huge open airy space and an open corridor divides the kitchen and my room from the rest of the house. It's all covered by a roof, though, so that's inside to me (though come to think of it, I don't usually wear shoes to pick jocotes or toss the baseball around either). Anyway, at my house we have millions of chickens and they have pretty much free reign to shit wherever they want, which is usually on my path to the table, the hammocks, the kitchen or the pila. My host family is extremely clean and the house is basically spotless, but the chickens are impossible. Also, I got a hilarious text from Catherine that reads "I gotta get outta here, a chicken shit in my drawer - actually shit on my crystal light and the baby peed in my bed DONE." This is the baby who is her namesake. We must start some kind of running list of insane campo situations. It may just be called "Catherine in the campo" or maybe "Tall tales in the campo," since we're all a foot taller than all Salvadorans (ok, I'm exaggerating, but really).


I'm finding more and more that I am taking responsibility for my Peace Corps experience and trying to get every drop I can out of the amazing friends I have made and the opportunities being in charge of my own work and success has presented. I came in unsure of myself and afraid of my inexperience. This is experience in every sense, and I need to remember when I doubt myself in the future, as I know I will, that, as my sister so aptly said, "This, too, shall pass, and my track record for surviving rough days is 100%." Come back to me after a bad day and I might change my tune, but for now I'm soaking it all in and storing away all of the good things on my mental bookshelf.

I'll leave you with some words to live by as I try to become the best version of myself, of course from the wonderful Mindy Kaling:

New Books Read: 86
Total Books Read: 124
Currently reading: Hard Choices by Hillary Clinton