Ahhh, the weekend in La Union. Slept in all the way ‘til 6:45 this morning, which was pretty glorious. That gave me just enough time to shower and get to breakfast a few minutes late.
Jose went into town today with Carmen and Wilson, in order to get more food. He left at 8 am and didn’t get home until about 5 pm, just another reminder of how different it is here than in Michigan. He said that it was about 3 hours each way and that he was fortunate enough to have 120 eggs in his lap the whole way home. He set the pallet of eggs down in the kitchen and headed straight for the shower because, as much as the potholes are always annoying, they are much worse with a pallet of eggs in your lap. I guess several of them had busted in his lap, so he had to ride the last hour with eggs sitting in his lap.
While Jose was in town, we went through more detailing of the procedures and protocol for conducting the study, now that we know quite a bit more about the area in which we are working. We knew coming down that, despite our best plans, we would need to go back through and adjust things based upon what we see in La Union. We also took this time to start writing up a list of individual roles within teams and formally write out a protocol booklet to give to all of the groups. There should be three different roles within the group. The introducer will be somebody that can speak Spanish without needing a translator, and will go up to houses, introduce themselves and our group, as for permission to survey and/or take the person’s picture, and talk to them until the surveyor is ready from the previous house. The surveyor will be the person who does most of the actual information gathering, and will be the person asking most of the questions. The final role is the organizer, who will be kind of like the quarterback, keeping an eye on everybody else, collecting information on households as surveys are done, and making sure that everything stays organized.
In addition to assigning these roles, we worked on the morning and nightly routine in order to be ready to go out into the villages, emergency weather protocols, protocols for exactly how to administer the survey, and many other things. We still need to go back and continue getting some of these written down, but things went quite well.
As our big Saturday entertainment, a few of us played volleyball with Jake and some of the local school children for a while in the afternoon. It was tons of fun, and Jake has obviously played quite a bit of volleyball in his life, because he was owning pretty much everybody else out there. It also helps that he is tall enough to spike over the net without needing to jump, I suppose. Many of the kids that we played with were pretty good, too. After playing for a little while, a bunch of girls from the school showed up, and we got kicked off of the court because Jake was coaching the first official practice of the Life Abundant girls volleyball team. Kelley and I helped out for a little while, but then had to leave in order to get back to work.
The other entertainment for the day was provided by Helde, another teacher at school with Jake, who invited us over to his house to watch a movie. Both Alexes, Kelley, and I went with Jake and Helde over to Helde’s house, while Derek and Jose stayed back at the compound and took of accounting for food and staffing for the week.
At Helde’s house, we decided to watch The Dark Knight because Kelley hadn’t ever seen it. The only problem was that we wanted to watch it in English and it was in Spanish by default. Helde’s remote didn’t have batteries, and the player itself didn’t have any way to navigate to the language menu. We tried taking the DVD out and starting it over, putting it in a computer and changing the language to English, and unplugging the DVD player, all to no available. Only then did Alex suggest the he might have some batteries in his backpack. Sure enough, he had some batteries that his dad had made him bring, so we put the movie in English and commenced.
While we were waiting, we played with Helde’s one year old son, Giovani, who was cool but a little terror. He started off playing catch with us with a volleyball. When that got boring, he started to bring the volleyball to us like he was going to give it to us, only to run away with it, squealing with delight that he had tricked us. When this got boring, he stole Alex and my hat, and switched between wearing them and pretending to give them back to us. And when that got boring, he resorted to pulling Kelley’s hair, stealing my glasses, and taking the Cokes that Helde had given us (which were amazing, by the way) and shaking them up. Cool kid.
The problem with being in La Union, but not for very long, is that I am still on Michigan time. At 9 pm we were about half way through the movie, when Jake stood up to leave because it was late. Earlier in the night, Jake and Helde had told us that it was only about seven or eight years ago that most of the homes in La Union had gotten electricity, so most people still were used to going to bed when it got dark out. They said that significant portions of houses in the villages surrounding the city still don’t have power, so many people still don’t have much of an option but to go to bed when it gets dark.
When Jake got up, we realized that we were getting close to wearing out our welcome, so we headed home as well. We were all hanging out on the compound when we saw a lighting flash bright enough to make us think that a light had burnt out, followed about half a second later by a deafening crack of thunder. We looked around to see Derek and Alex, who had been standing outside, running back towards shelter.
About 20 minutes later, without any cause that we could assign, the power went out. We made sure that we knew where everybody was, and then Derek went to grab flashlights for all of us. We were making plans for what to do for the night and discussing how we hoped the power would be back tomorrow, when it came on as unexpectedly as it had gone off. I am assuming there must have been a problem somewhere way up the line, possibly at the power plant itself, but turns out it wasn’t a big deal.
Pretty soon after the power came on, the rain started. It started off pretty lightly, and then the skies opened up and I learned what a true rainstorm is. It rained, and it rained hard. Within about 10 minutes, we saw small rivers as much as 1/2” deep running through the compound and at one point Alex measured the amount of water coming out of a 10’ section of gutter. We guessed it was about a liter every 5 seconds. Even the roosters stopped crowing for the first time in a week.
Let me pause for a minute to describe the roosters in La Union. Most people, when thinking about roosters, think about crowing at the crack of dawn. This is true, but the roosters here also crow at 7 am, noon, all afternoon, most of the evening, and worst of all, the entire night. There have been several points during meetings at which we have had to pause because nobody could hear each other over the roosters. The other really interesting thing that they do is that they communicate throughout the city every once in a while. They have a second call (in addition, of course, to the cock-a-doodle-doo that is almost background noise all day long) which sounds more like a coyote than a wolf. I awoke a few nights ago to this sound for the first time, and it was a very haunting experience. The night was almost silent, other than the normal crickets, when one rooster let out what I can only describe as a howl. Within 5 seconds, I am pretty sure every other rooster within a mile joined in. Within another 15 seconds they were done, and it went back to the normal nightly noise. This repeated itself several times, and then it went back to the occasional cock-a-doodle-doo.
After a while the rain let up, the power was on, the roosters were crowing, and we knew that all was right in La Union. With that, we all headed towards bed after yet another exciting and productive day. It is late and we will be getting up early to eat tomorrow so that the cook can get home to see her family for Mother’s Day between meals so, until next time, adios.
Patrick
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