Meat Buckets and Swear In

"Oh, 4,5,6 c'mon and get your kicks
now you dont need that money
with a .....wha!???, do ya!"--Matt & CRod performing "Be my girl" by JET at Karaoke

Greetings from Suriname.

Yesterday, we cleaned meat buckets. Like 50 of 'em. Today, we are officially swearing-in as Peace Corps Volunteers. I don't think those two events are correlated. Anyways, Yes, our training period will be officially over at about 6 or 7 o'clock local time. But, we are stuck in the city for a few more days before we go out to site which is okay with me considering I have not done any shopping yet. While some people have purchased beds, tools and food, thus far my biggest purchase has been a pair of soccer cleats.

Anyways, a lot has been happenened over the past few weeks. First, after my initial three weeks of living with a family, I went to my future site; where I will be living and working for two years. Absolutely loved it. The village is south of the lake on the Suriname River. It is a very small village, I was told 60-75 people but I only met 40-50 people during my visit. Everyone was real cool. My first night at village, one of the locals pulled me aside, told me he couldn't read English and asked if I could help him set up a TV. If a village has electricity, from what I've seen so far I'd say it's fairly common for people to have old TVs with a DVD player. So, I go to this guy's house expecting some early-90's Toshiba or cheap Japanese knock off. Can you guess what kind of TV this guy wanted me to set-up!? Flat screen TV! I could go for one of those in my hut too but the Peace Corps ain't goin for it.

Speaking of my hut, it's not too shabby. Two pretty good sized rooms, 4 windows, 2 doors, with a wash house and flush toilet behind the house. I also have some kind of open work house and a pit to burn trash. I have been hanging my hammock in the middle of the house so far and if you lie there and look at the roof and walls of the house you can see some pretty funny and amazing stuff. First thing seen was a tarantula. I was a little uneasy with it at first but we made a peace accord and if he stayed to his side of the room we'd have no problems. Unfortunately, he didn't stay to his side of the room. Crossed over to my sleeping space and he was evicted. There are a lot of other interesting critters in the house too--lots of roaches. The best thing that happened to me so far was the spider that crawled down its web from the roof--about 20 feet up, into my hammock while I was reading. I almost flipped the hammock in hysteria. That would've made for a great youtube video. And the coolest thing I saw so far was a kaiman. Except it wasn't so cool when I saw it because I was fishing on the shore and it darted into the water about 15-20 feet away from me. I was pretty damn scared but the villagers were pretty amused by that.

As far as work in the village, I have a lot of different work opportunities there. First, there is a tourist camp which is already putting me to work. There is also a radio station in my village where I am hoping to DJ--play music, put together informationals on health and business. I have identified other opportunities as well, some of which the other volunteers before me started and others I may try and put together on my own. Most of these will be small group or one-on-one type projects involving education such as English lessons--which if you read the grammar of this blog I am sure you know I am totally qualified to be doing...

Anyways, time to finally go and buy some food--can't live off of Milk Powder, Soy Oil and Soccer Cleats. I will try and post about my last 2 1/2 weeks of homestay tomorrow. I've got some pretty quality stories. Also working on uploading videos/pictures so stay tuned. Te Amanya(Til tomorrow)!