Writing a Report is Painful after 3 months in the Woods

I´m here in town on the computer because I need to buy tarp to seal the top of my thatched roof, and I also have a written report due in early February. Here is some of my report for your enjoyment-

Community Integration
Community integration has been a slow process. I do finally understand that the 3 months of Projecto Amistad were necessary to get the integration process started. Patience is definitely important for integration. Patience to answer the same questions to community members over and over again, patience to sit through conversations in a language I do not understand well (Ngabe), and patience to wait for people to feel comfortable around me. However, the patience definitely pays off when I understand a bit of a conversation in Ngabe or an old lady chastizes me for not pasearing with her in over a week.

For me, I have also learned that I need to be assertive with my integration process because many times people will not invite me to do things with them in fear that I do not want to. I need to tell people I want to go to the monte with them and work, or hike to a neighboring community with them, or pointedly ask people to expain to me what they were saying in Ngabe. More often than not, it seems that they are just waiting for me to ask!

I think the part of training that prepared me the best for my community integration was my conversations with current volunteers in the Comarca NB, and my volunteer visit to the Comarca. These experiences and stories gave me a decent idea of what to expect in my site, and left me with fewer surprises.

Challenges
-Dealing with community family tensions. My community is made up of 3 large families, and none of them like each other. Often times I feel like the go-between in the community since none of the families communicate. Slowly learning the history of the tensions has helped me respect and have more patience with the situation.
-Setting fair expectations for the community. I try to talk as much as possible about why I am here for two years and what I hope we can accomplish together, yet at the end of the conversation the aqueduct comes up again.

Lessons Learned
The value of literature - A few times I have left English newspapers and La Vaina by the fogon to be burned, and later have discovered my host mom marvelling over the photos, or my host dad practicing saying English words. Now I know to offer people the reading material before burning it!

Be straight forward and up front about things that matter - I was unsure about whom to walk with about the house building project, and now I realize this process would have been much less stressful if I had openly talked about it with both of my host families from the start.