[Insert Job Description Here]

During training, we are told, “your service is what you make of it.” If you want to be out of site all the time, hanging out at the bar, sure, you can do that. Or you can make something amazing of it. To remove any doubts that last sentence might have created; almost all volunteers opt for the latter.

I opted for the latter as well and there are days where I'm out and about in Panama, living another day of my Peace Corps service, and it will dawn on me that, I get paid (as little as I do get paid haha) to be doing what I'm doing. I had one of those moments today when I was in the middle of the jungle hiking up to a water source. A fellow volunteer, in a different sector than water systems asked if I could come and take a look at his system. After that simple interaction, I was now out hiking with him in his community, which is about twenty times larger than mine, to offer what experience and knowledge I have to help assess the water issues being faced by the community. I'm going on a tangent too far, let's steer this back in with some pictures of where I was working today:

Crossing a stream on the way to the water system.

Finally arriving to the water source.

I've also had other amazing work experiences such as when I helped my regional leader deliver some documents to a future volunteer's community. Besides the fact that the area was absolutely beautiful, we got to eat lunch and hang out with the future host family for a bit. The father of the household told us a very interesting story about the roof tiles which his grandfather had constructed over 100 years ago and still survived to this day.

Passing a large orange farm on the way to the community.

The rainy season is in full swing and mud is everywhere.

After taking public transportation to the end of the road, hiking an hour into the community,
we  now have a guide to take us the rest of the way to the host family's house.

Look at that beautiful roofing.

Then there was the time that Engineers Without Borders (EWB) visited a fellow volunteer's site and cultural/language facilitators were needed. I got to spent a few days hiking about my friend's community assisting EWB in their trip.

Community guide leading the way to the next house.

Back when I was a member of EWB at Rutgers University, I had seen a GPS map that was constructed by a group member and I was interested in making my own. As part of my first three months in site, I was required to make a map, so I ended up making a GPS map.

...and then writing a guide for other volunteers to do the same.

I also had interest in solar panels and the neighboring community's health post had some problems with theirs...

These are just a few examples of the many cool work opportunities that Peace Corps offers. Of course not all of my cool opportunities revolve around work. I also give myself some breaks to...

Attend the Black Christ festival.

Party at carnival.

Spend Christmas in Santa Fe with other volunteers.

Travel to Peru.

Watch the US-Panama soccer game.

Attend the Sombrero Festival.

At times it’s hard to justify my time here, typically when I'm sitting at the lowest of lows of a slump in my service. But when I'm not sitting there, life is pretty awesome. Of course you cannot have the bad without the good and the same carries over to life in the States. However, Peace Corps has some pretty awesome good times to offer and I think it has been well worth it. (And for you too if you're considering joining!)

Work Update

It’s been awhile since I've posted an update on my work, so here it is, divided by work type.

Water Project

About a month ago we finished measuring the current water system and the parts that will be added in the future. Measurements that were taken were of relative values of elevation and distance throughout the entire system. Combined with tube diameter, number of faucets in each house, and water flow in the system, I’ll be able to analyze the system and identify weaknesses. I’m currently in the process of doing that part.

Another issue we've been facing is that the land owner of our water source wanted to charge us monthly to use his water. Finding an answer to whether or not he could do this was a bit of a challenge since everyone had a different answer about how to resolve the problem. Eventually, we got the right answer and are now able to continue on with fundraising, since a land agreement was a requirement for requesting funds from a specific NGO.

Here I am presenting my water committee president
with a certificate for completing the water seminar.

During the days of September 5^th and 6^th I organized a water seminar in my community. This is probably the greatest tool Peace Corps has to offer. Over two days and about 4 hours each day, four volunteers and myself discussed topics including health in the house, system maintenance, how a water system works, and how to run a successful meeting. I ended up getting somewhere between twenty and thirty community members to give up their time to attend. All in all, it was a great success.

VAC (Volunteer Advisory Council)

I took on a year-long position of being the representative between the office staff and volunteers as the treasurer of VAC. Recently, I finished updating the Welcome Book which is what all new volunteers in country receive prior to arrival. Volunteers had expressed concern over several issues in the book and I set about resolving them. The process involved getting input from about 60 volunteers, and several office staff. With all the information, I set about condensing it down into a more conscience and helpful form. It’s being finalized now and new volunteers will receive the book starting in February.

Entire EWB Group

Engineers Without Borders Tour/Conference

Engineers Without Borders hosted their international conference this year in Panama. My bosses selected me to represent Peace Corps at the conference and also to lead a day long tour to a neighboring community that has had volunteers in the past to show what Peace Corps does. Everything was a great success and I got to meet many awesome people and share a bit of Peace Corps with them.

Victoria leading an introduction to
 agriculture with Peace Corps

 Agriculture

My community is very interested in improving agriculture practices. Since the water project is generally pretty slow, I took this opportunity to disperse some agriculture presentations between workdays in my community. We’ll be having our first presentation the 14^th and 15^th of October covering coffee. The following month we’ll discuss traditional crops. From there, we might have business and fish and rice tank presentations.

Six Months in Site

It's now been almost six months in my site and I figured it would be a good time to update you guys on what I've been working on in and out of site.

Work Stuff
The first few months, usually about three or four, of Peace Corps is mainly about adjusting to the culture, learning the language and meeting the community. While doing these tasks we work on PACA tools which is a set of tools used to gain information about the community and identify needs. For my community it was water and latrines.

The first few months flew by pretty quickly and were broken up by Thanksgiving, family visit, and two weeks of additional training. This past Sunday I organized my first water committee meeting. Before the meeting I went to my water committee president and asked him to notify the community of the meeting.

Sunday morning I woke up early and spent several hours preparing the presentation. At two I headed to the church to setup for the meeting, I brought crackers and juice for the early birds to wait while the others slowly trickled in. Panamanians operate on "Panamanian time" in which instead of the phrase "early is on time, on time is late, and late is unacceptable" it is "early is unheard of, on time is early, late is on time". How's that for a mind boggle. So at 2:20, after 20 minutes of waiting and not a single person showing up, I pack up and head home. At 2:40 the president arrives.  Turns out he only told the committee of five. So only 1 in 5 people showed up... not as bad as the entire community of 100 not showing up. With the meeting a bust, we decide to hold elections for the following meeting and we'll get some more intersted people involved.

This is roughly an equivalent encounter for many volunteers. The going is rough and if it was easy, well, I wouldn't be here. So I've decided to turn to other projects.

My first attempt at stepping outside of my main role was to contact all Engineers Without Borders chapters working in Panama. Ten total. So I get to messaging them all and one group requests my help. I offer help in ways I can such as knowledge about culture, language, and hardware store prices/materials. We work together for some time and they invite me to travel with them and help out. I got rather excited at the possibility of a week in an indigenous community and I happily accepted. Sadly, it turns out that there was an incident with a volunteer being in the wrong place at the wrong time two years ago and Peace Corps had pulled out of the area, the same area I'd be passing through. Peace Corps refused my work request and my involvement into that project sadly fell through.

From here I continued chasing every possible lead and decided to get involved with VAC, the governing body for Peace Corps volunteers. I ran and was elected for treasurer. I'm responsible for the money obviously, but also in working on various merchandise to sell, organizing Thanksgiving, being the bridge between volunteers and the staff, and generally helping to serve the volunteers in the best ways possible. This has thankfully opened up a whole new door of possible work and if I cannot help the communites directly, I can help improve volunteers' situations so they can better help their communities.

Potential Work

Recently I got the opportunity to get involved with another Engineers Without Borders project. I'll be headed to a volunteer's site to help translate the community analysis interviews between EWB and the community.

The neighboring community had volunteers for six years and the lady who works at the health center is very motivated. I hope to help her fix the solar panel and vaccine refrigerator setup and to also start a recycling project.

Her sister is currently running for the Panamanian equivalent of leader of the county in which I live. She would like to try and start a water project in another neighboring community. I'll either work on that project as my own or help develop it for Peace Corps for a future volunteer.

It's surprising how quickly after the fatal blow to my first EWB project that new work popped up all over the place. I'll definitely try and get myself involved in as much work as I can while here.

Outside of Work
I've been keeping very busy outside of work. I've already mentioned by book reading at this point (closing in on 20!). I've also put up some painting and drawings I've done. Since having my point and shoot camera stolen during carnival, I decided to start using my fancier DSLR and finally learn how to use it. That's been going pretty well so far and I'll post some pictures soon enough from it. My garden has also been taking off. I've got roughly 8 feet by 4 feet of garden with beans, Jamaican Tea, peppermint, lemon grass, spinach, squash, tomatoes, spicy peppers, and one or two other things I'm forgetting. I've already consumed my first tomatoes and drank lemon grass tea. I've also been working on my cooking. In China I was lazy and continued to cook like an American but a lack of nearby food stores and electricity has caused me to change my ways here. I've started learning how to prepare and combine various vegetables, make sauces, utilize spices, poach eggs, etc, etc. Hopefully by the end of my service I'll be growing and eating awesome FREE meals. My sombrero is coming along. I finished weaving the required 40 feet of material but I need to get the mold to get the actual sombrero shape going. Last but not least are the random skills I've been working on. These include sewing, juggling, whistling with fingers and telling the time/directions from the sun.

In closing
I've surprised myself in being able to keep up my work habit without a set schedule. Hopefully things will improve within site with regards to work but if not, I'll continue the hunt outside and keep busy with my hobbies inside.

Every Day is an Adventure

Every morning I wake up at about 7:20. This gives me about 15 minutes to be fully prepared before heading out the door. I walk for a few minutes and take subway line 2, to 7, to 1, to 5 with roughly five minute transfer walk in between. Then I exit the metro, walk another fifteen minutes, and arrive at work an hour and a a half later. I do this twice a day, every day. Why you ask? Because I wanted the city but my company wanted the suburbs. Luckily I utilize this time to read, practice Chinese, play games, or sleep. One day I instead of my usual time passers, I decided to bring a camera to highlight some of the interesting things I see on my daily commute. 

These are x-ray machines that you're supposed to place your bags in. Most people ignore them and the security guards don't seem to care.

TVs in the metro stations. There are also smaller versions in the trains.

Too much reflection to fully express this picture. This right here I would consider the normal amount of people for a train. Seats fully taken with a lot of people standing.

Had to be sneaky for this. For 66% less than a taxi fare, these guys will give you rides on their motorcycles to work. They generally drive like maniacs. Took me several months but I finally took a ride. 

I think the irony of this picture is lost in the small size. The background says no dumping into the water.

It's interesting where you find houses in China. This road is completely full of factories except for this house, if you can even call it that. If you look close enough a kid is peeing on the street.

If you're a Shanghai resident than you can use these bikes. Being a resident of a city isn't quite the same in the United States. I'm not sure of the exact requirements but of the 22 million people living in China, 9 million are not residents. 

One of the paths I walk along to work.

Input the Engineer, Output the English Teacher

It all began with a request from my boss to assist in leading an English discussion for one hour three days a week. I didn’t really think much of it at first, just going in to the discussion, speaking when I was required to and not much more. One day I saw a list of what everyone was in charge of leading and I saw my name and another coworker as the leaders for English discussion. About this point it dawned on me that even though I was an intern, I was not being treated as such. I was being given a great opportunity to be a leader while other interns are busy getting coffee or delivering mail. Always feeling that I possessed unrefined leadership, I took this chance and ran with it. 

It started small with the introduction of two or three new slang words and phrases every English discussion. Feeling that I was not utilizing my English to the fullest extent to help them, I pushed on. Next came the introduction of a very useful word game that occupied one of the three days a week. Not content with the setup of the other two days of English discussion I set out to change them as well. Monday became topic day where we would discuss a topic such as travel, movies, and sports. Friday became news with a discussion of one or two topics each week. Content with the state of the English discussion, I sat back and went with the flow. 

With maybe a week of calm, I got a request to setup the game I made within another group. Upon completion of that I was then requested to join their English discussion permanently. A week later another group asked me to assist with their discussion. Within the same week I was asked by my boss to visit a factory in another city once a week to lead discussion and be available to answer English technical questions. Within two weeks I went from leading one English discussion to a schedule filled five days a week with four different groups. 

I never thought that I would have the potential for being a teacher but this experience has taught me otherwise. Patience for people learning things was pretty much non existent six months ago but now I am much more patient and understanding. In time I’ve watched their English transform a great deal. When I first arrived I had to talk very slow but gradually over time I’ve increased my rate almost to the point of where it was before China. The most rewarding moment though is when I hear the slang I’ve introduced in English discussion outside of the discussion when we’re just sitting at our desks talking while we work. While I can’t that teaching is where my career path lies, it has been a great experience to improve leadership and get my feet wet in an area I would have otherwise not experienced.

Battle of the Firewall

It's been tough trying to post these last few days since the program I use to connect to Blogger, Facebook, Youtube, etc has been giving me problems. I finally bit the bullet and purchased a program with a monthly fee that is much more stable. Blog posts should occur more often now. 

Wo bu ming bai ni!

I have to say, I’m glad I started this blog because I’m scared to think about where my English would be today without it. The people I interact with on a daily basis are Chinese, French, German, and Indian. Missing from this list are American, British, Australian, etc. Thankfully almost all of the people I interact with on a daily basis can speak English, but not all of them can speak it well. This leads to me greatly simplifying my grammar and vocabulary and slowing the rate at which I speak. After eight months here, I can only hope this blog and my limited interactions with my friends and family back home will be able to lessen the blow to my grasp of the English language.

P.S. the other day I was writing some stuff down and wrote “word” as “yord” and “check” as “chek.” …Uh oh.

America Town

Whenever I’m missing American food and want to pay four times the average price of a Chinese meal, I head to Munchies. This restaurant is about the closest you can come to American food without being in America. It’s got hamburgers, wraps, sandwiches, and Mexican. Not feeling too adventurous after my run in with Mexican food, I decided it would be best to stick to my friend’s suggestion of hamburgers which was a good one because they’re amazing. Sadly, my hamburger isn’t accompanied by the smells of barbeque, the sounds of football, and the sight of red, white, and blue but for now they are a good enough. (And no I didn’t get paid to write that.)

I went to China to become an Engineer and Came Back a Teacher

I think the best thing about China is that they don’t drink coffee and as a result I’m not in charge of coffee runs. The printer is also about two feet away so I’m not in charge of making copies of documents either. Thanks to being born in a native English speaking country, I’ve been given the chance to partake in some projects with a much larger role than a typical intern. One such project was being in charge of writing the final document for the standards of design for my engineering group. Outside of engineering, I’ve been picked to lead an English discussion three hours each week. By the time I finish my internship I’ll be qualified for ESL teaching positions. Sadly, not everything is positive but fortunately the negative isn’t so negative. Not being able to speak Chinese has led to me missing just about every word spoken in meetings except for the rare occasions where the presenter speaks English or one of my coworkers translates. Outside of meetings we sit in an open environment with four desks facing each other. I managed to get placed with the youngest and best English speaking people in my group so time spent outside meetings are generally pleasant. Overall, being a native English speaker in a Chinese company has led to many great experiences and opportunities that I would not have found in an equivalent American company. 

Speechless

A few days ago one of my coworkers passed by my desk and made a remark that my health bar was in fact unhealthy and he wouldn't eats such a thing. He stated that he didn't know what path the food took to get to its final form and that there could be contaminants. I responded that the same applies for all foods unless you watch them grow and that there are lots of chemicals used in producing food. After five minutes of back and forth attempts at each of us explaining our points with him talking about contaminants and me talking about chemicals, he turns to my other coworker and asks, "What does chemical mean?"

The English Corner

Can you tell the difference between "listen" and "hear"? I can't, but still managed to get picked as the resident English teacher at work. Two weeks ago, the idea of the English Corner, was first introduced to me. Two hours a week, after lunch, I would co-lead my colleagues in improving their English. With no proper training of any sort, I went into it the best I could. The first meeting went rather awkwardly with no real direction but each subsequent meeting has show great improvement. At first I didn't take initiative but quickly realized, as the native English speaker, the harder I try the more I can help them learn. To assist in advancing their English knowledge, this upcoming Thursday I'll be introducing the "American/Chinese Culture Exchange," where I introduce my coworkers to the likes of Caddyshack, The Terminator, and other fine works of art that America has to offer.

Playing hide and seek with the sun.

Shanghai is currently in the midst of monsoon season. Two weeks of almost non stop rain broken up by the occasional sunny day to get the humidity going strong. The somewhat blurry picture was shot during one of the first few days of monsoon season. The water is flowing ridiculously fast out of the gutters. If I didn't know any better I would have assumed that a pipe had burst and water was flowing from it. Luckily for me, I've got two things in my favor. First of all, the rain doesn't bother me too much and I rather enjoy it. Secondly and more importantly, the Chinese come prepared when it comes to these two weeks. Once the first drop hits the ground, the vendors are out and about selling umbrellas. Already a week in and surviving quite well, can't wait until the next season, dry and really really hot.