It has been a few weeks since my last update and I can honestly say, I have been pretty busy.  Between the few classes that still have a some people in them, meetings almost nightly with the cooperativa to work on a business plan and really attempting to get the community behind the basketball court, I honestly have not had much time.  However, the cooperativa plan is done, I have done all I can with the basketball court and now am just waiting to hear back and classes still struggle along.

On the map:

First off, I want to start off by letting everyone know my community is officially on Google Maps!!!!  Henry and I have been working with "Google Map Maker" this past 2 weeks to draw the roads, put in the infrastructure and buildings and researching what ways we can request some satellite photos of our community.  But for now, you can search "asentamiento Linea Vieja, Pococi, Limon, Costa Rica" on Google Maps and see a little of the community and where I am located.

English Festival: Guapiles

One of the bigger events this past week was the regional English Festival in Gaupiles where Peace Corps volunteers from TEFL worked with the ministerio de educacion publico to put together a pretty fantastic festival with students from all over the Limon province to compete in the Spelling Bee and "impromptu" speech.  Henry was the winner of the circuital round and therefore represented our region of Pococi (I think) along with 5 other students from around the region (three of the five had Peace Corps volunteers in their community and I was the only CED volunteer).  Unfortunately, despite all the prep work and practice, Henry stumbled on the word "entrepreneur" which was part of the secret word list and we had never practiced it before.  Definitely a shame since he knew all the words the other girl had but none the less he ended in second place for the region but that is as far as he is going this year.

Update on the basketball court project:

So it was certainly optimistic to get all of this together in a three week period but I definitely tried my best.  I have delivered surveys to nearly 60% of the community and received about a 50% return rate which isn't too bad, spoke with the ADI, sports committee, high school and elementary school as well as a whole bunch of community members about the project and finally spoke with a "master of work" about some of the supplies that would be necessary to build a 23m x 13m basketball court.  I also spoke with 3 other PCV's that had constructed a court in their site in the past to see what their budgets looked like and unfortunately the numbers I received from the "master of work" were very far off from the numbers the other volunteers had.  But seeing as I was crunched for time, I went ahead and sent in the budget I had and am hoping for the best.  Even if we aren't able to get the court built this year, now that I know the process and what is required by the community, applying next year will be much easier.

Cooperative Business Plan:

All I can say is I am pretty glad that process is over but it all culminated with a big meeting on Tuesday with 7 different government organizations all ready and willing to help the coop out in a variety of ways.  The day before, the president of the coop asked if I could come to his house to review the business plan and send it in which we did.  He then said we need to make a presentation about the numbers and project we are planning to implement, however he failed to mention that this presentation would be for the meeting with the government organizations the next day.  We really quickly put together 6 slides, six...slides..before I had to go to class and I left thinking the presentation we "started" would be for a later date for a presentation to the MAOCO organization.  However, the next day when I showed up to the meeting with the coop, the 7 government people came and Carlos, the president asked me if I had the presentation we did the day before...honestly, it was pretty embarrassing.  Fray had never seen the presentation before and since I had assumed the presentation would be for a latter date, I only wrote 3-5 words per line which he read verbatim and added nothing else.  Naturally, none of the government organizations were too impressed and one member when trying to explain why he thought the cooperative was failing, ended up getting shouted at (more or less) by Carlos.  I mean...I ended up leaving midway though because "I had class" but mainly because Carlos and Fray were actively ignoring some of the very important notes the officials were saying and in some cases were speaking over them not allowing them to speak.  When I saw Carlos in the street later that night and asked him how it went he said "oh they don't know anything".....Well they gave the coop "homework" and now we have to get together and really take a look at what the hell they think we're going to do.  The business plan we have been working on was pretty much ripped apart by the officials but the cooperative still wants to go ahead with it and as much as I want to help them, I don't think Carlos and Fray can be persuaded away from this plan.  All I can say is thank god i'm going on vacation in a week!

Thats this weeks update!  One week and counting until Bocas de Toro in Panama and thank god it's almost here!!!!

As always, thanks for reading!

-Conor