Pizza Hut, Community Meeting and Campo Life

Right now I am reporting from the Peace Corps Office in San Jose. I am currently in the capital to get some things checked out medically with me. I am fine, just getting some routine checks done. It is nice to escape a little bit from my site and enjoy the luxuries of a mattress, hot shower, and flush toilet. Today I went to Pizza Hut for lunch. Here in Costa Rica, Pizza Hut is considered the place to go for a businessman and busineswoman to conduct casual meetings over lunch. Everyone is dressed in business casual clothes, its quite different from the fast food/family atmosphere pizza hut has in the states. As I was eating my personal pan pizza, I saw this women constructing her salad at the salad bar. This salad was a piece of art. She had potato salad and hard boiled eggs acting as retaining walls for her plate and piled her salad 6 inches high onto this miniscule plate. In Costa Rica you get to only go to the salad bar once and you have to fully take advantage of that one trip. Anyways it was a nice lunch and good to have a familiar taste after two weeks in the "campo".

This past Friday I held a community meeting in my community where about 30 people attended. I facilitated a discussion as well as an activity based on learning about different aspects of the community and its needs. Overall I feel the meeting was a success and I learned alot about the community. This past Monday, there was another meeting for the community held in the school lunch room regarding the prospective building of an aquaduct in my community. One of the top concerns of the people in my community is the secure and constant line of fresh potable water to their houses. As of right now people retrieve the water from wells or get their tanks filled up every once in a while which is a difficult and costly process. An aquaduct project is a large one, which would take alot of time but definately would improve the quality of life for everyone in the community.

Everything else in my community is working out well. My family is great, the 5 dogs, 25 chickens, 5 roosters, 5 pigs, 25 cattle, 4 horses, and 1 turkey are doing great as well. There is alot of construction going on at my house as they are expanding the number of rooms. I will also be getting a new room which should be nice. On my way to the school one day to talk to the teachers, I was walking in the middle of the road and looked down and saw a 6 foot long snake. As I was close to my house I told my host brother of the huge snake in the middle of the road. He told everyone else in the house and everyone came running, including one guy working on the house with a huge 2 foot long machete and sprinted to the snake and immediately executed it with one strong swift blow to the head seperating the snakes head from the body. Campo life something new everyday.

Anyways that is all for now. I hope everyone is doing well.

Peace out.

Rudy