Categories
Peace Corps Uncategorized

Photos, Computers and Friends

It’s hard to believe that Jon and I are coming to the end of our service.  This July we will be making our way back home.  They say that the Peace Corps is the “toughest job you’ll ever love,” and I couldn’t agree more.  While I wouldn’t trade this experience in Villarrica for anything, it definitely hasn’t been a walk in the park for either of us.  It has now been almost two years since we last touched American soil.  We miss family, we miss the comforts, we miss friends. So thank you, thank you to all of those that have made that void a little smaller for us, sending us encouraging messages and updating us on life, Skyping with us, mailing us packages full of goodies and letters, we truly appreciate it.  And thank you to those who have visited us or met us elsewhere in Latin America. Seeing familiar loved faces is always a welcome respite.

Today I wanted to share some highlights of what life has been like lately. And by that I mean these past 8 months.

A while back I shared pictures of our town taken by our students. Below is an image of the final exhibition of the photography course. Everyone was pretty excited to find their photos.

_MG_9140 _MG_9141

When we first visited our town one of the first places we went to was the Telecentro, a free public computer lab run by a local NGO and the municipality. The lab had 10 computers that were 14 years old.  They were so old that they couldn’t run Windows, which in turn meant no MS Office.  With the staff in the lab I wanted to teach computer classes, but felt it would be irrelevant doing it with Linux.  I crunched numbers to see how much we needed to replace the computers and it was just too much to ask family and friends back home for.