Surveys

So I did about 8 surveys last Sunday, and maybe 4 or so on Monday, then probably over 50 on Tuesday! There were a ton of people in town to receive food donations from a government program so I took advantage of that and set up next to the table where they had to register and people were begging me to fill out the survey. I got a lot of people from other communities which is good because my goal is to get at least 5 or so from each community if I can. I don’t think I’ll be able to work in all 28 communities, but I’m trying to find out where people don’t have any sort of toilet or latrine so I can help them with some ecological dry toilets (which are really cool and I want to build one in my house when I go back to the US) and where there are women’s groups working so I can give them training on birth control methods. There are some that are already really well established and doing community bank projects, so hopefully I can work with them a little and then just talk about that to women from other communities to encourage them to do the same thing. I think the birth control “charlas” will be really important too because its not uncommon for families to have 8 kids and make $100 per month, and the women don’t use birth control just because they don’t even know what it is. It’s all free in the subcentro, so hopefully if I just talk to them about it they’ll take advantage of it. I’m finding from my surveys too that everyone is interested in home gardens, so I’m planning on doing something with the agriculture volunteer who is already in my site. Now I just have to go through my surveys an make a spreadsheet or something to analyze them, so that should be lots of fun hours sitting at the computer.

Sunday is the Worlwide Day of Prevention of Undesired Adolescent Pregnancies – I bet you didn’t even know that existed did you? I made some little posters and hand outs to give out and next week I am starting to teach at the high school. I will be doing sex-ed stuff, but I want to start out with self esteem stuff and then later talk about STDs and general anatomy and stuff, but I invited all the high school kids on Sunday and am making some of them do a homework assignment of 2 things they learned and 2 questions they have. Hopefully the teaching stuff will go well; I’ll have 2 classes of 14-15 year olds, about 30 minutes with each class every week.

That’s all for now, I’ll write more after classes start!