This is all stuff I wrote up on Tuesday, June 20th, but I forgot to post. I also forget a lot of details for the week after that. Bear with me, please.
After a weekend of rest, we interns are [mostly] recovered! Friday was spent in bed for a good period of the day with lots of tea and soup. Saturday was almost equally as relaxed. We had a chance to sit around and play a few rounds of Rumikub (which is surprisingly huge in this country. I have yet to find a house that doesn’t play it often!) with our host family before we parted ways. Two of us went to the store to find food for our lunches through the week as well as to purchase ingredients for the breakfast we would make the next day. Victoria went (don’t worry, not alone) to Quito to pick up her friend, who is here to 'observe' at a hospital, from the airport. The late night was likewise filled with rest and laughter until the early hours of morning. The next morning, we cooked an “American Breakfast” for the host, her mother, and her two kids (let’s be real. They were both older than us. One was visiting from university in Quito).
We got held up trying to leave for church to the point where, when we were finally free, it was about 30 minutes after the service started. Being that my understanding of Spanish is miniscule, I figured it would be more beneficial to listen to sermons online. One of the ones I listened to, titled “Beyond Happy” by Matt Brown (pastor at Sandal’s church), was about our tendency to focus our lives on the pursuit of happiness, both external and internal. Those are both “moving targets,” so to speak, whilst there is only one target that is stationary. It was interesting because the church down the road likewise had a message about finding happiness and joy through a life dedicated to walking alongside God. It was pretty neat to see how, all these miles away, the messages were the same.
Later that day, some of the host’s other family members arrived to celebrate Father’s Day and I had the chance to sneak away from the celebrations to Face Time with my dad and wish him. He was still at church setting up for VBS, so I got to see a couple familiar faces, which warmed my heart. Normally I don’t experience homesickness, but these past two weeks have been wrought with it. There are those who I wish I could just spend an afternoon with, either out on a hike or gathered around playing games.
The workweek started as if it were a stuffed waiting room at a doctor’s office. It was long. It seemed to drag on. And on. And on. We started work at 8, and from then until 5:30 I was working on formatting a map on AutoCAD from all the surveying points we took in San Bartolo. Now hear me out, normally I would love to work with AutoCAD for extended periods. For me it’s a blast. But when the program continually messes up the data, when you open a file and all the points have been rotated, and when the program begins to freeze every minute, it kinda sucks.
The rest of the week progressed; it was a pretty chill week for the most part. On Thursday, the 22nd, we travelled to Calhuasig to get preliminary information on their system. Shortly after, my boss asked me to write a quick write-up about that experience. I’ll post that as part of my next post.