Little Lebowski's Peri-Urban Achievers

When schools are on vacation for Christmas, it's important to find projects and activities to do to occupy your inevitable free time. As the break was approaching, I was planning on holding a basketball camp at my school during the break, since the school has the only basketball hoops I've seen in my neighborhood. I submitted a proposal to the Nun/Principal, after being assured by my counterparts and other teachers that it would be approved. After some deliberation, it got rejected because something about how they needed the space for construction workers to move around while working on a new school building. Although I believe that it still would have been possible to have the camp at the school during construction, since they have been working on the building for months during the school year, I'm just going to chalk this one up as differing ideologies that Sister principal and I have concerning what activities have priority at the school.

After the secondary project setback, I was searching for other activities I could do to avoid being stagnant. No work and no play makes Tyler a dull boy. So I decided to help out my friend Mike, another Peace Corps volunteer that lives in Cartagena, with his girls' softball/leadership camp. He had equipment donated from a U.S. organization. He planned the camp with one of his counterparts, Vilma, who is famous among the volunteers for wearing, to an official Peace Corps conference, a giant wolf t-shirt. It was pretty bitchin'.

Mike lives in a small town just outside Cartagena called La Boquilla. It's a bit higher on my "dirt roads/naked babies running around" index for judging how, lets say "simple," a place is than where I live. I never thought I would say it, but after staying there for two weeks, I missed all the amenities I had in Barranquilla like toilet seats, running water, and stoves that don't singe off your knuckle hairs every time you light them.

The camp started out great. About 25 girls showed up the first day. In the mornings we had workshops about topics such as self-esteem, nutrition, the environment, and leadership. We also taught a dance to the girls each day. Some went better than others. They really liked the funky chicken and the apache dance from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. They weren't really feeling it when we tried to teach them to move it like Bernie. After a short three hour break for lunch, we would meet up at the beach to have some softball drills and play a short game. Or this was the plan at least. We soon found out that many girls tended not to come back after going home for lunch. On Monday, most of them from the morning made it back for afternoon softball, but by Thursday, only a handful showed up. And on Friday, we had to cancel that day of camp entirely because no one showed up at all.

We decided we needed to get the word out about the camp to the community again. We made flyers and spent a hot, sweaty afternoon walking around the town spreading the word. We also decided to start the camp earlier and have it only in the morning, because once them girls done gone home fer lunch, they ain't gonna come back. The next Monday, about 50 girls showed up, which was way more than we could really handle. Luckily, the numbers thinned out to a manageable quantity later in the week. The second week went much better than the first week. Most days 20-25 girls came and most of them stayed all morning. It was great to see them improving over the course of the camp. Girls normally don't play sports very often in these communities, so many were excited to have an opportunity to participate in organized team sports, especially when all the equipment was available.

On the last day of camp, we held an Olympic type decathlon. We had events like softball tosses for distance or accuracy, frisbee tosses for the same, 50 yd. dash, and long jump. I was somewhat surprised at how well it went. The girls all seemed interested and focused until, toward the end of the morning, when a dead dog washed up on the beach. After that, the girls seemed a bit distracted, so we only got to finish 9 out of the 10 events. Still not too shabby.

This is Mike's blog, where he has a day by day recap of the camp: It's Always Sunny in Colombia

Funky Chicken time

Base hit!

Breakin' it down

They got the frisbee fundamentals down

Dangers of being an outfielder: getting hit by a bus

And how proud we are of all of them

Christmas in Colombia II: Y Esta Vez Es Personal

This Christmas marked my third in a row away from home. Now, I'm not a big Christmas guy. I'm not big on all the Christmas celebrations, family time, or music. It's mostly the food that I get excited about and, now that I'm here in Colombia, the idea of being cold. So I can't say that I'm not jealous when I hear stories friends tell of going back to the states for the holidays.

Christmas time here starts even earlier and in fuller force than in the U.S. They start rolling out the decorations around Halloween, and it gets exponentially stronger from there on in. I'm not a fan of U.S. Christmas music, but I would take it any day over what they play here. If it's not the four or five songs they have on repeat, in which the word "navidad" accounts for  roughly 75% of the song, it is a song sung by a chorus of off-key children. It's only made better if I'm awoken at six in the morning by my family blasting the songs from their giant speakers. I find that I'm much more prone to grinchiness here than ever before.

 On Christmas Eve, I played the role of a good host son and went with my family as they visited other family around town. Here, Christmas Eve is a bigger event than Christmas Day. It usually involves staying up all night drinking with your family, which is something I can get behind. At the relatives' house, we hung out for a while and listened to loud Christmas music. Then at midnight, we gathered inside for some sort of Christmas prayer sesh. Afterward, we went around in a circle and each person spoke for a bit, something along the lines of what they were thankful of. Before my turn, my host father went. He started talking about how grateful he was for his wife and about his struggles after getting heart surgery and how he appreciates his second chance at life. It was really emotional and he got choked up saying it. Then it was my turn. I had one hell of an act to follow. I threw out something about how grateful I was to have such a nice host family, which is true. But luckily no one really expected much out of me, so I got off easily. After a second dinner and the most dairy-dense desert I've ever eaten, we went back home at around 2.