Security?
Where to begin? Peace Corps Guatemala has gone through many changes over the past month. The security of volunteers in the Northern Triangle of Central America (Guate, Honduras and El Salvador) has been under review in Washington for over a year...which makes you wonder why they continued to send volunteers here in the first place. At the end of January we had an all volunteer security conference where they confirmed many of the rumors that had been circling around the PC community. PC Guatemala is cutting its volunteer population in half in order to make security more manageable, and they are relocating the majority of the remaining volunteers to a more centralized location.
How are they doing this? The next two groups of volunteers due to COS (Close of Service) in 4-6 months are being forced to COS in the next 3 weeks. They also offered every volunteer the opportunity to COS right now with full benefits, as if they had served their full 2 years. Although it is very tempting to return back to the comfort of family, friends and health, having served only 6.5 months, I don´t feel as if I have earned it yet. Luckily, I am not one of the many people who have to relocate. A lot of the volunteers who are being forced to change their site have decided to go home because of the lack of time that they would have in their new site. It takes an incredible amount of time and energy to adjust to a new site and to gain the trust of the people living there, which is one of the reasons volunteers serve for 2 years.
This being said, PC Honduras recently shutdown and it looks as if PC El Salvador is on the same path, so I am lucky to have the opportunity to stay in country.
These security issues have resulted in many of my friends returning to the states, which isn´t very fun for me. In the beginning of January there were 225 volunteers serving in Guatemala. The suit from Washington who came to speak to us at the conference told us that their aim was to get that number down to 100, which has been a blow to morale for the PC community that has decided to stay.
Anyway, these PC security rumors/issues are all I have heard about for the past month, so I don´t want to dwell on it anymore.
This past Monday I taught one of my women´s groups how to make homemade soap using water, vegetable oil and caustic soda. Obviously, I had no idea how to do this before last Friday. I got in touch with another volunteer who does know how to do this and she gave me some good advice.
- You should add an aroma which can be done cheaply by using flower pedals, lemon peels or cinnamon sticks
- The color of the soap is bland, so I suggest adding a color dye to the mixture
- Instead of buying a gallon of fresh vegetable oil you should go to a fried chicken joint and buy their used oil, I promise there is no odor
Taking her advice I decided to use lemon peels to give the soap a nice fresh scent. What color goes best with lemons? You guessed it- I bought two packs of yellow dye. Lastly I went to a street vendor and tried to buy his used vegetable oil, he thought I was crazy, but before long I found a vendor who didn’t care how crazy I was as long as he could take my money.
Lemon peels from 15 lemons didn´t quite have the effect I was hoping for, neither did the yellow food dye. And the fried chicken vegetable oil… well, that turned out pretty much exactly how I expected, although I was hoping against my own judgment that the other volunteer was right and that used oil would be odorless. Our mixture resulted in a large bucket of what looks like something I am far too familiar with now, diarrhea, and has an overwhelming odor of fried chicken. But don’t listen to me, you be the judge…
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| Stirring up some soap |
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| First time wearing goggles and latex gloves |
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| Palin with my girls |
until next time...
