The weekend before last (October 17-18), Sarah and I had planned to have a meeting out in El Limón to give a health talk and to plan the details of the Small Project Assistance (SPA) grant. We’ve been working in El Limón for the past year, giving health charlas every two weeks with the promise of bringing a small amount of money through SPA and we are finally reaching that goal. Anyways, we get out to the community on that particular Sunday and begin our ritual of waiting an hour and a half for everyone to trickle in and gear up for the meeting. After waiting an hour, we begin to feel like something is off. Where are the regular early-birds? When there is absolutely no one after thirty minutes, forty-five minutes, an hour – you begin to feel like something is off. Wait! What’s that in the distance? Someone’s coming! And up rolls Don Martín, the mason for the project and an all-around decent guy, only to tell us that “Hey, there are parties all over the municipality and no one’s going to show up.” We end up chatting with him about the project and life in general, and then pack up to walk the five miles back to town. At least we got some exercise. As it turns out, there was a miscommunication between the President of the COCODE, Roberto, and the Treasurer, José. Roberto had to leave in a hurry to get to Guatemala City for some paperwork that was due and José was the guy in charge of transport for the community to get the party and figured Roberto would call us.

Sarah calls up Roberto during the week to plan for the next Sunday (October 24). So, we get out there at two and begin waiting once again. Feeling a little sour from the week before, we decide to forgo the charla and just work out the details of the concrete floors. People begin to roll in, and we breath a sigh of relief. And then we notice something odd – not only are people coming in droves, there are people here who have never come before! Amazing! Roberto must have done some serious motivating to get all of those people to come. We hold the meeting, working out all of the details, and basically leaving the project in their hands. If we do all the work from start to finish, we are not helping in the long-term because they come to expect headache-free projects (otherwise known as “gifts”).

Okay, now we’re caught up to today. After our monthly Health Promoter Workshop in the morning, we decide to call up José to see where they stand on their end. Turns out he already bought the sand and cement to begin the construction of the concrete floors! Not only that, but the sand has already been delivered! They plan to divide it and distribute everything today or tomorrow, and begin construction shortly after. We’d love to help out and build a couple of floors but it seems as though they are determined to do the project themselves. For example, at the planning meeting, they were all convinced that “every family for itself” was the best approach when we tried to suggest the idea of one or two teams doing all of the work, passing house-to-house. They’ve made it clear that they are perfectly capable of doing this themselves, and to micro-manage may come off as condescending. We’re definitely walking a fine line – on the one hand we want to make absolutely sure everything goes as planned, but on the other hand we don’t want to insult them by doing just that. They already have the distribution lists, the materials, and the will. The only thing we can do at this point is help build!

And that, in a nutshell, is our working life in the Peace Corps.

Posting this for anyone else that runs into trouble importing images from blogspot/blogger services to WordPress.

I had previously used blogspot for the first part of my Peace Corps service. I later switched over to wordpress and found that all of my images were still on the blogspot servers and, even worse, they were all html files linked to .jpeg images. In order to remedy this, I went in search of solutions in the WordPress Codex and online in other blogs. I came upon this nifty little plugin: Blogger Image Import.

However, the plugin was not designed to handle blogger/blogspot’s funky html-to-jpeg linking. To clarify, “s1600-h” loads an html page that links to the image whereas “s1600″ is a direct link to the image. Here is the fix I used in order to get around this problem:

1.) Open up phpmyadmin and click on the wordpress database.
2.) FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS HOLY, BACK UP YOUR DATABASE
3.) After backing up the database, click on the SQL tab and enter this query:

UPDATE `wp_posts` SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content,"s1600-h","s1600");

Once it tells you it has finished, you are now set to use the plugin — unless you are coming from blogspot. The plugin searches for all URLs that contain the ‘blogger.com’ domain, but all of my URLs contained the ‘blogspot.com’ domain. To fix this, open blogger-image-import.php and search for this line:

$innerT = $urlchar."blogger.com".$urlchar."\.jpg";

and replace it with this:

$innerT = $urlchar."blogspot.com".$urlchar."\.jpg";

Hopefully this helps someone out