I've been an official volunteer for over a month:)

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  Concepciòn, Bolivia
Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Hello all :) Well, it's been over a month now as an offically sworn in volunteer and I'm still here. Concepciòn is a lot of the same stuff. I'm still kinf of floating around town trying to get to know the community and spending time in the tourism office and at the restaurant hanging out. My community diagnostic is the main thing I'm trying to work on right now, and fortunately I've gotten a bit of help from the departamental government who decided to do a tourism plan for Conce. The weekend after my last blog (when I planned to relax and do laundry and wash the dog) I ended up working with a guy from the Prefectura (dept gov) from Santa Cruz on his diagnostic. We worked pretty much all weekend and then into the week before I left for Thanksgiving doing surveys with tourists here and collecting baseline data from the hotels and restaurants here in Conce. That took up pretty much all of my time up until Thanksgiving and now he is working on that info as well as some info he collected during some workshops to compile for his plan. We are still somewhat working together, but once his plan is done, we will probably be working together more closely trying to implement stuff. I will hopefully then be able to build off of what he is doing to get some of my own stuff going. Basically I think this is a good thing, and it is definitely helping me with my diagnostic I think :)

Anyways, Thanksgiving was good. We all hooked up in Santa Cruz and Tyler and I made creamed corn to take with us and made the baked apples at the resort. Both were a big hit, but I dare say we made a bit too much creamed corn. Oh well, it was good. Although it was a bit thick because even though Mamagene warned me against putting too much flour in it, we still managed to do exactly what she told us not to do. We thought that the cream would get thinner when we added it because of the juice already in the corn, but oh were we wrong. It just became almost a solid, but after adding A LOT of milk, it turned out really good :)

We got up early and went to the resort on Thursday and pretty much hung out by the pool all day. It was a beautiful day and a beautiful place. There were probably about 40 of us there so we all had a good time. We had dinner about 7 or 8 and there was a whole table full of good food. There was our creamed corn and baked apples of course, as well as, sweet potato dishes, turkeys, stuffing, mashed potatoes, lots of veggies, cranberry sauce, soups, and loads of other good stuff. All in all it was a good Thanksgiving (maybe not great because I wasn't with family, but good nevertheless).

Friday, we ended up back in Santa Cruz fairly late in the day and just kind of hung out at the hotel watching movies on cable and catching up on sleep. Saturday was rainy and nasty so there was more movie watching until I went salsa dancing with some friends, which was pretty fun. We also ate at a German restaurant which was also pretty good. I'm now partially addicted to their soft pretzels and sweet/spicy mustard that comes with them :)

Sunday I headed back to my site with another volunteer whose site is close to mine. She's been working on a project with the mayor's office here in Conce, so she's spent the last week here in Conce, so we've been hanging out a lot. I've still been around the tourism office, and we've been working on planning the town festival that will start this Thursday. I was in charge of taking pictures of some of the officials to put on the program, and that took a large part of 2 days, since they are all so busy. I also helped design the program, so that was a lot of fun. Anyways, I have a meeting later tonight with the tourism people and the artisans to work on organizing the artesania fair that will take place all weekend during the festival. Other than working on that, I've gotten through several books and been watching some movies. I've recently discovered that I really like the books by Gregory MaGuire, once I read Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, (yes I know Mom, Megan, Susan, and Blaire that everyone has been trying to get me to read his books for a while now and I protested, well, make sure to save this e-mail because I was wrong. I really liked that book and can't wait to come across more - which is a bit difficult here - so I can read them). I've also discovered Elizabeth Peters who writes kind of like British mysteries with Amelia Peabody as her main character. The one I read was rather late in the series I think (The Snake, the Crocodile, and the Dog), but it was still good, and I'm going to see if there are any more floating around PC folks :)

Oh well, that's about all I know right now. I've uploaded some new pics from the past several weeks, so check those out at www.flickr.com/photos/amz8op Otherwise, there isn't much else new, so hope all is well wherever everyone may be, and that no one gets too stressed out over the holiday season. Hope to hear from some of you soon, and good luck with Christmas shopping :)

Happy Holidays!!! Amy.

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