October Update

Hola!

In the past month (in which I have not updated my blog), I have been trying to fix my digital camera to take pictures to post here, which really is why I haven’t posted sooner. Anyways, I have been easing into my new Regional Leader role (maybe I haven’t announced here that I am taking on this leadership position, but here, officially, I’m announcing it). The former leader is still around so I have been learning the ropes from her, but starting mid-November and until I leave in April it’s going to be the Raquel show. The position is essentially three-fold: volunteer support, agency relations and new site identification and development. So I get to be somebody important to volunteers, to our local agencies (I have met our Provincial police chief!) and to the office/program directors. I’ve decided to take on this role while still living in my site (can’t get enough of that clean air and tranquility), which has meant a lot more time riding the bus to my provincial capital. I read a lot, but that’s wonderful. It’s nice to feel like I have a schedule some days, and the rest of my days I can hang out in my town and be okay with not having so many actual projects going on there. I have seen some new parts of my province, and will be exploring much more of it as I essentially cold-call/visit potential new volunteer communities. EEK! It’s a daunting prospect, but I know I’m capable of pulling it off.

I was also preparing heavily for the GRE’s, which I took on Saturday. As prepared as I was for the test, being in Panama was not to my advantage. I made sure I had a good night’s sleep, and arrived at the school an hour early, just in case I had the location wrong. This wouldn’t have been any big deal except that the proctor only arrived at 8:30, and it took another half hour for them to tell us to line up to register, then we waited over another hour for them to find a microphone system to be able to read us the rules and announce the time. So, we started 2 hours late because that’s how things work in this country. I can accept that generally, but in the case of a United States-administered test where a person’s future is (in part) on the line, I was expecting something better. Or was I? I did have a worry that something like that would happen…like they’d lose the test books or something. So instead of being done right at lunch time, the bulk of the test happened between 12 and 2pm, which are eating and siesta hours in my book. I’m concerned about my score, really, since I was not my fresh in mind, body or spirit when it came to the rapid-fire math questions, but what’s done is done and hopefully my other merits are much more important to any potential program. And no, I have no specific ideas, plans or timelines about grad school, I just thought this would be an advantageous situation in which to take the test because I could study and take it on paper…I guess my plot was foiled! The big kicker for me is that this sort of thing happens constantly, and there is no consequence for the school’s messing this up. It’s not like they get paid to do this, or are going to get fired or otherwise penalized. Hopefully my complaint and others’ to Educational Testing Services will prevent this from happening to other people (I also know that this is not an isolated incident, as a friend took her subject tests two weeks ago and similar things happened to her, including the proctor interrupting her during the test to ask how she was feeling, how she was doing with the test!).

So, those are the two major events that took up my time in the past month. November, as you may all remember from my first blog postings, is a fiesta month, because it’s Independence Day/Country Month. So I will take out my FILM camera and be snapping pictures because I know I will regret not having records of all this cultural activity. Maybe I will find a way to post the pictures.