groupo gringos

well breezy it has been over the last 10 days as i sorta led a groupo gringos on a service trip, mostly high school kids from a boarding school in the NE and a few adults. beautiful and fascinating, at times inspiring and at times more in the manner of say a week old dead and rotting elephant seal on a pristine beach.

now i pèrsonaly would never shell out a grand to go and slave away for a week, but i can understand that not everyone is up for jumping out and hoping the chute opens. and they get to see some beautifully remote places, full of happy kids who for the most part go to school for 4 hrs a day till they are 16 or dont feel it anymore and then go get knocked up repeatedly. plant some corn n beans, eat some corn n beans, make babies that will plant and eat more corn n beans, play a bit of soccer, its not bad. 4 year old kids walking around freely, in rubber boots a bit too large, happy kids, laid back town, no alcohol there so people are good, hardworking, and really mellow. one guy in town sports the full length straight chops and a thick handlebar mustache, always smiling, everybody missing lots of teeth, but, other than a general lack of dental care, seemingly a carefree way to while away the days. they got some slowly running water a few hours a day and no electricity but they may someday.

so the project i was working on had a taste of zen, as it involved tearing up a badly made concrete floor in a church and pouring a new one. then they ran out of sand so i got to switch to working on building an adobe classroom at the ngo´s demo farm. have people pay to come down and do your work, gotta love that. the other one involved building a cistern or somethign to catch water from a spring. mostly hauling sand and cement and the like.

well at the momento my cabeza is feeling a bit funny, was a bug passing around and i got it. not too bad but right now i seems to have lost most ability to regulate body temp, so i am wearing a fleece jacket and its far from cold. but, this brings me to a valuable lesson: the shits, 101. so, lets say all of a sudden you come down with the shizziles, what to do? while your instinct may be to reach out and grab the immodium you must resist. many of the gringos on the trip did that and promptly spent the rest of the day yakking. you see your body is reacting to the bugs waging the guerilla war inside your gut by flushing them out, and if you clog up the downward path, things only got one way to go. so give it a day, or two, and as you start to get better perhaps take some.

well i think people may show up soon ( i live at the office, which is actually in a house, in a back room) so i better put on some clothes, spiff up and the like.