(tee hee) I found some sustainable development at the office.

I’ve been mean­ing to take my new, big zoom lens to work for a while to cap­ture the amaz­ing insect world out there. Finally I remem­bered this week, and then the prob­lem was that I had a lot of work to do. I kept try­ing to leave the office a bit early in the evening to have some time to crawl around on the ground and take pic­tures. It was such a photo-taking bounty though, that I could never leave myself enough time or, bet­ter said, as much time as I would have liked. Even 10–15 min­utes was plenty given the grasshop­per pop­u­la­tion on the path between my office and the park­ing lot. I will just have to keep haul­ing the cam­era and big lens out there I guess. Oh my hard­ship in the Peace Corps.

I also may have acci­den­tally talked myself into some­thing resem­bling Tech Trans­fer at the office. That’s what I get for try­ing to have a project con­ver­sa­tion in Span­ish. The next con­ver­sa­tion, to clar­ify the details, should prob­a­bly be in Eng­lish, but it was great that the first dis­cus­sion was in Span­ish. I felt it was impor­tant for the social aspect of the interaction.

I’m try­ing to keep a good atti­tude about this con­ver­sa­tion I had with my coun­ter­part yes­ter­day after­noon. My atti­tude about pri­mary project work is an ongo­ing chal­lenge. I gen­er­ally feel more pas­sion­ate about my sec­ondary project work and the oppor­tu­ni­ties that I’m try­ing to develop. How­ever, those are sup­posed to be sec­ondary projects. I’ve thought about some ideas for projects at the office, but I have not been work­ing to imple­ment them except for teach­ing Eng­lish. We are almost 6 months in site, and I real­ized that if I don’t actu­ally do any­thing about these ideas, then the 2 years will slip away and it will be my fault, lazi­ness, and prob­a­bly bad atti­tude that kept me from try­ing to sup­port the Tech Trans­fer pro­gram. At least now, whether the projects suc­ceed or fail, I will have tried and I will have some­thing to talk about come mid-service train­ing. I’m being vague on these “ideas”, but I’m sure to write about them in the future when things are actu­ally hap­pen­ing. Bal­anc­ing pes­simism and real­ism, it is still to be seen how much of the con­ver­sa­tion yes­ter­day leads to real action, but I am going to con­tinue for­ward with pos­i­tive expec­ta­tions. (Any­thing that will keep me away from that damn microscope…)