So what exactly are you doing out there anyways?!

This is one question that I am sure most PCV´s spend their time trying to answer. The longer I am in my community, the more I realize that the answer to this question only becomes more complex instead of clear, harder to answer instead of easier. The culture, history, my relationship to the people, their relationships to each other...navagating through all of these things my biggest job of all...the actual ¨work¨becomes secondary.But, now that I have been living and working in San Cristóbal for almost seven months, I feel I can try to give a better explaination of what I do day-to-day and what my overall role had become there.

Officially, I am a community ecomonic development volunteer working for the Peace Corp. Peace Corp is a grassroots development agency, meaning it takes a bottom up approach to development as opposed to top down. We are considered grassroots because our focus is people, process over a product whereas other topdown approaches work on a much larger scale bringing lots of money and big projects. While these top down approaches have good intentions, they sometimes fail because time isn´t taken to get to know the people and what they actually want. We live in our communities for two years in order to build relationships, gain trust and through those relationships work together to transfer knowledge and accomplish goals the community themselves have identified as projects they want to make happen.

My primary project is helping my community tourism group with all aspects of running a sucessful tourism business. We work on things like accounting, basic record keeping, marketing, putting together tour packages, building a hostel and working with outside tour operators who visit the community. I have also become a link between outside agencies, such as USAID and other NGO´s, helping my community to navagate things like paperwork and excel documents. I also spend a big chunk of time doing physical working with them, whether we are hauling wood, cleaning our nature trail, cooking food, or making artisanry. When and how we work on these things depend on them. They have lives, families and responsibilities so I also try to keep things on track to help us complete important paperwork. Obviously, I don´t work on this project all day everyday. I have also started some secondary work which includes starting a girl scout group (yup, just like in the states minus the yummy cookies) and working with the english teacher who works in the school.

I consider San Cristóbal my home, so I do normal stuff like laundry, hang out with my neighbors, color with the kids, sew, read in my hammock and gossip with my friends. In a way I think it is these small everyday things that have the biggest impact. People see me as there friend, adopted daughter, the gringa who lives next door who lets us color in her house, as Pai. Those things are far more important to me than having people see me as a Piper, Peace Corp development worker. At the end of the day, they will remember that I spent the afternoon making bread with them just visiting, not that I helped them balance a check book.

Here are a sampling of photos I have taken over the past few months.

I have started sewing more and have made a few dresses for the little girls and new babies in the community. Everyone calls this little girl Muñeca, which means doll. She is one of my favorite babies and always makes me laugh.

I went on a all day hike across my island with some friends and we came across this grandpa hauling a load of bananas back to his house.

I have started taking photos of all the new babies so the mothers can have a copy. This is Yasi, the new baby girl of one of the artisan ladies, Darmaris.