Still here when the smoke clears

I'm changing up the home life and moving into a new house! Hopefully this will happen on Monday. My new place is like a little apartment! It's probably bigger than my apartment in Brooklyn, but that's not really saying much. The family that I have been living with is very generous to me, but it has been really hard to live with a family and especially this family. The place I'm moving meets the Peace Corps Peru requirement that all volunteers live with families because it is attached to another family's house by a shared yard and chicken coop, thus endearing me to live chickens, a life form that many know that I previously utterly disdained due to an unfortunate living situation in rural Ecuador.

Dora and Martin, my current host family parents are very, very concerned about what people will say about them when I move. Dora is basically livid at me about it, but would never actually say that to me. It is an impossible situation for me there because they're so disliked by everyone in town. They supported the mayoral candidate from the other side of town and now everyone where I live dislikes them and suspects them of receiving money under the table from the mayor for having me in their house. In addition, she is a very outspoken person who sometimes enjoys reaming folks in public meetings, like of the PTA or the local Women's Association. It really doesn't help the popularity issue. In any case, this social drama which has made my life and work very difficult has conspired to support my search for a new abode and voila! I love chickens!

Also, I have found myself in an inferno of women's volleyball. My women's group wanted to participate in the new municipal tournament. There are 11 teams and 1 game a week, so it's a really, really long 11 weeks. Fortunately, I'll be missing the game this weekend and then there are only 4 more to go. The real bummer is the meeting every Tuesday for an average of 3 hours (sometimes up to 4 and a half). These meetings involve knock down, drag out yelling matches between team representatives over which teams are doing what wrong. I can barely follow the arguments because of the language used and the speed of the conversation. Better, I was inscribed as the representative (by the aforementioned host mom) when I was on vacation with my parents and after I specifically asked to not be put as the representative knowing the fighting that the meetings would involve. Our women's group and the high school are the only ones with female representatives. Even the organizing committee is like five men and one woman. So every Tuesday I am one of two or three women at these horrific events and then after 4 hours of horrid fighting in which I inevitably say the wrong thing I tearfully retire to my family's house. I never did like volleyball... Only 4 more weeks.

In other news, the head of USAID Randall Tobias had to resign due to an embarrassing situation with an escort agency. The irony here is that he implemented an ¨anti-prostitution policy¨ of the Bush administration for American international aid around the world that really hurt people who do sex work.
See: http://www.urbanjustice.org/pdf/press/bloomberg_04may07.pdf
or any of
http://www.urbanjustice.org/ujc/press/sex.html?tr=y&auid=2656199