The dengue passed...

...and I didn't die. :) It took 9 days to get over all the symptoms. I went home for 3 days, then returned to the capital to go through my mid-service medical exams. Can you believe I only have one year left? I can't! I feel like this last year is going to FLY BY!

Anyway, back to the mid-service medical exams. All of us got to do all the fun medical stuff you can think of. Dentist exams. Gynecologist exams. Blood and excrement tests. (Side note: Due to me never having parasites and/or amoebas, I was pretty nervous about hitting the cup while going #2, but it's actually fairly easy to do! You know, just in case any of you need to do that in your lives.) Tuberculosis tests. The outcome of all of that? Nothing is wrong with me. :) I'm actually amazed. I thought for sure after a year in country, I would hear from these professionals, "Fijate que...you have 10 cavities" or "Fijate que...you have 5 types of parasites and amoebas", etc. But I heard none of that. Although, the gynecologist did find something (that many of the gals in my group also had) and I had to take 1 pill to clear it up. (Due to the reactions I got from all of you during the underwear shopping story, I will leave out most of the details of what she found...)

So, here I am a week later totally healthy. Now onto the project status of the Cyber Cafe and Internet in town...

If you're interested in seeing the project overview (I translated it to English), here and see "The 3rd World Cyber Cafe Project: Draft I".

I haven't talked about this in a while, but we're doing great with the planning of the project. One of the high school classes needs to complete a mini-project for credit, and I convinced a group of them to use the Internet project as their mini-project. So I meet with them for about 4 hours per week to work on it. In the last month, they've created an objective, a time line, a project description, calculated the beneficiaries, and have identified non-profit organizations that we plan to solicit for help in the project. I'm doing the budget part of it, and I'm VERY close to being done with it. I'm just waiting to hear back from a Peace Corps staff member about salary information for computer lab personnel. We're planning to use students (and possibly 1-2 adults) to run the cyber because each high school student is required to complete 4-5 social hours per week in order to graduate. This will allow them to learn more about networking and computers during their studies, and allow the cyber to run without the heavy cost of a salary. But I need to assign a cost to that work. The school superintendent/principal told me that normally students are paid $3/hour and engineers $10/hour to run a computer lab. So I split the difference and assigned $6.50/hour for the work. But it comes out to $28,080 as an annual cost and that seems WAY high for an El Salvador salary. And it's something that the community will be "paying" for, so I want it to be reasonable. I don't want the organizations that we will be soliciting to think that we're inflating that number to increase the percentage of the project cost that we will be covering. But, otherwise it's going pretty well.

Also, the city council, the cooperative of farmers, and the entire educational system support this project. I feel like that will help a lot when we start soliciting from other organizations. It really demonstrates that this is a community-driven effort, not just some small group of people. Also, since there are no Internet sites close by, this project will make Internet accessible for 2 other communities apart from ours. In total, it will end up helping about 18,700 people. (Or at least they will all have easy access to it.)

Many of you have told me in the past that you'd be interested in helping financially with projects. Don't think I won't ask for it. :) However, the people in this country have a mentality that they can't do anything without money from the United States. So, I'm trying to show them that it IS possible to get things done with community support and support from non-profits in the area. I really don't want to get ANY help from the states, if possible, in this part of it. If....wait, no....when....we get this project done, we will be starting a new phase of the project: building a computer lab in the elementary/middle school. During THAT part of it, I will most likely be more open to receiving money from the states because they won't count on it so much.

Anyway, that's the plan for now. We'll see what actually transpires...

We've created a very tight schedule to implement this project; we want to open the Cyber in November of this year. Whether or not this happens will really depend on 2 things: (1) how much work the students put into raising community awareness and funds and (2) whether non-profits are able to allocate money within a month for the project. Since we're close to the end of the year, I'm really worried about these organizations saying they'll let us know next year. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

In the last meeting we had, the students were a little...nervous. No, that's not a good description. They were scared to DEATH. I showed them the amount of money we need to raise and told them it was up to them to get it done. I said, "Look. I could do this project. But then what will happen? Everyone will say, 'That's just the gringa's project' and no one will use the cyber cafe and you will all lose Internet here at the high school because we won't be able to pay for it. But if you do this, and you get community support now to make it happen, what is the result? It will work."

And they still looked pretty unmotivated in my opinion, so we went back and forth:
-------------------------------------------------
Me: What benefit will you all receive from doing this?

Students: We'll have Internet.

Me: And?

Students: We'll finish our project for our class.

Me: And?

Students: The community will learn more about computers.

Me: (sigh) And?

[long pause]

Students: It will help us.

Me: How?

Students: To find work.

Me: That's RIGHT!! You can put this on your resumes. Who do you think a company is going to hire? Someone with a diploma that's done activities like pick up trash, or someone that has experience working with a non-profit, someone that has a RELATIONSHIP with a non-profit that brought thousands of dollars here to COMPLETE a project?

Students: The second one.

Me: Uh huh. So, even if you DON'T want to do this for a grade, and you DON'T want to do this to have Internet here, do it so you'll have experience that can help you get a job!
-------------------------------------------------

That seemed to motivate them. We're living in a country where people get college degrees, like lawyers, doctors, engineers, teachers, etc. and can't find a job. Experience REALLY makes a difference here.

So, this email has been quite long enough, huh? I just wanted to let you all know I'm still living and working hard down here! I miss you all!! Oh, and I'll be going back to the US at the end of the month. I'm flying into Chicago on the 19th and flying out of Columbus on the 29th. Let me know if you're interested in hanging out and we'll try to set something up.

Talk to you all soon! I hope you're doing well!!