You Can’t Start A Fire Without A Spark

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: time flies in Peace Corps.

This was especially true last week, when I was happily surprised by the number of people who came up to visit me for Cornfest, and how long some of them ended up staying!

Donna, my most frequent visitor, came up early. We got to spend a few wonderful carefree days together making veggie pizza (just like the first time she visited me) and teriyaki stir-fry; watching dubbed movies on TV in the mornings; shooting hoops at my deserted school while the kids marched around the city for Independence Day; hanging out in the pool at Luz de Luna, and relaxing.

Then on Friday I got to see some awesome people, specifically Claire, Liz, and Alex, all of whom stayed with me in my host fam’s house with Donna and I for the weekend, and a bunch of other volunteers who converged on the city to take in the Cornfest.

The Cornfest itself was kind of a letdown compared to last year’s. It was rainy and cold most of the time, especially on Friday night during the Battle of the Corn Bands; there was no corn wine stand; there were fewer floats in the parade and fewer horses in the hípica than last year. But the company made it a much better experience overall. It was such a strange feeling actually having visitors! Everyone enjoyed the various edible corn products at the fair, the milkshakes at Yo-Yo Pan, and the excellent food at El Mojito.

I was especially glad that Liz got to ride a horse in the hípica on Sunday, after much confusion and running around. The family friend who was supposed to bring the horse to my host fam’s house for her unexpectedly got drunk and passed out, so Liz herself had to go out into the countryside to get the horse, and ended up riding on a blanket instead of a saddle, because the drunk guy had the keys to where the saddle was. But hey! She still had fun, and I got some great pictures of her on her slow but steady horse:

And for my mom, here's a video I took of the start of the parade, with lots of pretty horses passing by my house:

(you can see all the horse pictures I shared on facebook here)

***

Everyone had left by Monday morning except for Alex, who had graciously agreed to run a training for a local women’s organization, OYANKA, who offer counseling, legal services and shelter for women who’ve been abused. Alex is quite crafty (in the sense that she likes to make things, especially out of recycled materials; not necessarily in the likes-to-think-up-clever-schemes way). We had been tossing the idea of running a craft-making workshop in Jalapa around for months, but it took me until the end of August to finally talk to the women’s group, find out that they were indeed interested, and set things up between them and Alex and Peace Corps.

I’m so glad that I did! What we had initially imagined would be a one-day training ended up being a three-day camp, in which seven women (and me) learned how to make:

jewelry from magazine pages

Bowls from newspaper or magazines

Wallets from cardboard

Ashtrays from aluminum cans (center right, filled with magazine beads!)

And puzzles from cardboard (which I forgot to take a picture of). Some of the craftier women learned how to make purses from folded chip bags:

(that's Alex on the left, and Sunni, our most enthusiastic student on the right)

and how to turn plastic grocery bags into thread to crochet with (I did not; I am not crafty enough).

It was a great experience. The women were so committed to learning, and it was really awesome to see all the cool stuff everyone made. Alex said it was her favorite project to have worked on in all of her time here, which made me really happy. The women have plans to keep crafting with Jessie, a lawyer from Colorado who’s down in Jalapa working with OYANKA for the next few months. They hope to sell what they’ve made to a group of volunteers from another organization, ISLA, who’s sending a dozen medical volunteers to Jalapa for a week in October. They might even create a page on etsy.com to sell things to people! If either of these things end up happening, there’s a chance they’ll make enough money from the sales to buy more of the non-recycled materials they need to make stuff (glue, beads, hooks, nylon thread, stuff like that), and turn it into a self-sustaining business.

Like a certain rockstar from New Jersey once said, “You can’t start a fire, you can’t start a fire without a spark.”

Fingers crossed that this spark turns into something bigger!