Well there are only 14 more days left until I leave Maria Jesus. I keep changing my mind on whether 2 weeks is a long or short time. In regards to seeing my family back at home, it honestly seems like a long time. But in regards to my service, 2 weeks just doesn’t seem like enough. The campamentos (our educational classes) we’ve been having are my own personal measure of success on a daily basis. At first, these campamentos were great; we had high attendance and full participation. But as the weeks have past, our attendance has greatly decreased. But on the other hand, the small classes we had did have its advantages. For one thing, we were able to do more one on one work in addition to less physically intensive activities, like poems and songs. The kids were more focused and we got feedback right then and there. The success of the other main project is a bit more difficult to measure. Like I said, we have 14 days left in community and we are still waiting for confirmation on a grant. I keep reminding myself that AMIGOS doesn’t define a CBI as a completed project. They look more at the process you’ve taken. For example, our construction project of a preschool is expensive, but the whole community is in full support of it. So instead of scrapping the expensive project and completing a more affordable and smaller scale project, our supervisor and our group decided to go for a grant that will hopefully allow us to build the school. Although we haven’t built anything yet, we have been taking all the possible steps to get the money for this project. We also have plan B in case the money falls through. Also, my group and I have really tried to use the resources of the community. For example, this Thursday we are having a lady, Aleida, from a local non-profit called CESEMA co-facilitate a “taller” (workshop) on pregnancy prevention with Efrain, a guy who works for another non-profit named Movimiento Comunal. I believe our small successes such as these make the community more unified and in a way more responsive to AMIGOS and the presence of its volunteers. If the community sees that we are actively pushing and fighting for a project they want and are genuinely incorporating their human resources, they will know that AMIGOS volunteers are here to collaborate with them, not simply to impose our ideas and our projects on them. At the end of the day, this is the goal, so even though we don’t have as many kids attend our campamentos and even if we don’t see a finished pre-school, I have the satisfaction of knowing that we’ve gained the respect and warmth of the members of Maria Jesus.

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