FRIIIIIIIIDAY!!

My first Friday in the Habitat office was pretty chill, as everyone was looking forward to their weekend plans. I finished my orientation yesterday, and met with the Construction Specialist for Central America and the Caribbean Region – Minor Rodriguez - to review and plan for my projects. It looks like I will be working on two complementary, but separate projects…the first a construction site safety project – to provide an orientation and handbook to incoming volunteers about the potential safety issues they should be aware of; as well as; a similar document (but in Spanish) for the new homeowners – as most have never been on a construction site before, and will now have to provide hundreds of hours of work on their homes, as well as on other Habitat homes (one of the provisions for a family to be chosen to buy their Habitat home is that commitment)…and finally a document to help the construction site foremen provide a brief orientation to safety issues to everyone who will be working with them on the site at the start of the day. The second project originally began as the Environmental Impact Assessment of the construction process; but that may have been overly ambitious to complete in 8 weeks; and the safety project was of higher priority…so the EIA got pared down to an analysis of the amount and type of waste produced by the construction process, and a proposal on ways to help minimize that waste.

Meeting with Minor was a fun time in and of itself, because he speaks a little more English then I do Spanish…but not much…so between hand gestures, and the google translator we managed to have a pretty in depth conversation in Spanglish. After lunch and meeting a few new volunteers who were just starting their orientation on Friday, I set to work in earnest on my research. Around 4 pm I was supposed to receive an email from a friend from AU – Benjamin, who is down here in the Natural Resources and Sustainable Development program which has a semester in DC, a year in Costa Rica (at the University for Peace) with an internship this summer, and the final semester back in DC, next spring. However, Benjamin never dropped me that email so we couldn’t get together for a couple of beers…but minor setbacks like that never stopped me, and I managed to convince 3 people from the office, Wes (the volunteer coordinator), Diana and Marco to head out after work…and we hit up El Pollo Cerversero…essentially the Chicken Beer Bar :o)

After a few $1 brews…Imperial is pretty delicious…we scarfed down some delicious rotisserie chicken that had been cooking all day and was ridiculously tender, for dinner, and then went on a mission with Marco who was trying to sell his car. He left the phone number of the guy he was supposed to meet at 9 pm in the office, and forgot his code to get in the building after hours…so we tried to call a bunch of people, and we even drove to the office and tried to convince the guard to let him in…no luck…so we gave up on that mission and headed over to San Pedro – the section of town where the University is located. After battling for a parking space, we walked over to these two streets that are filled with bars, restaurants, clubs, pool halls…and jam packed with all types of kids…from preppies to punks with some gringos mixed in here and there…all the while kids in their pimped out rides were cruising down the street dodging pedestrians and crazy taxi drivers…kinda made me feel like I was 16, just got my license and needed to cruise the strip at Salisbury beach. So we snuggled into a outdoor table at one of the bars, where we could watch the action on the street, and began work on a pitcher of Imperial. After polishing off the pitcher we decided to hit up the pool hall, where Wes proceeded to dominate (he waited until ½ way through to tell us all that he grew up with a pool table in his basement, and that his Dad at one point was so good that he dropped out of college to make money hustling.) Like any fun night on the town, it ended with a pilgrimage to the local pizza joint, for a late night slice. We then climbed into a beat up old taxi and held on for our dear lives as the guy ignored every stop sign, stop light and traffic law known to man…Wes got dropped off first, so I had to spend the second half of the ride in this cab solo…and of course made some small talk in my basic Spanish…at which point the cabbie offered to pick up a prostitute for me. I dunno – do I look desperate or something? Seems anytime I go out someone is trying to get me a hooker. Rediculous. Anyway – I made it home safe, and got in the house without having to wake anyone up, and without the 200 lb English Mastiff mauling me.

PS: i just spilled my morning coffee all over me :o)...quite standard wally maneuver...if you can't laugh at yourself when you do something like that, your gonna have a stressful life. Pura Vida.