Mountain Biking

I spit in my helmet the other day.....

Got something stuck in my mouth and my natural reaction (like anyones) was to spit out. I did not realize i had a helmet on so i splattered off the face mask and back onto my face. It was pretty gross. Now that you have that image in your head......

I am finishing up site visits, and traveled to remote Paradero yesterday. This campo is about an hour and a half up a mountain.....all dirt and gravel. It really tested my driving ability, which turned out to still lack experience. I felt so uncomfortable that I paid a motorcycle taxi driver to drive MY motorcycle back down the mountain after the visit with me on the back until we hit pavement. I was even more scared being on the back than driving myself, ha. Made it alive, gracias a Dios. View from the top:

So, since this site is so remote the project pretty much defines itself. It has a lot of potential with the infrastructure that already exists. We are not trying to re-invent the wheel or anything. The goal is to build off of what is already there. They have a "clinic" that is very poorly run and the one doctor and zero nurses are hardly ever there. When he is there, he does not seem qualified to treat patients as many have left the clinic confused and given medicine to treat symptoms they do not have. There is a lot of Doctor turnover as the on-site doctor is really a medical student who is doing an internship, and they change out every 9 months. The instability leads to a lot of uncertainty.
There are some health pomoters, but they are undertrained. The biggest advantage Paradero has is it leadership, and its mostly women. The ladies control this town, and since the men spend most of the day in the fields, this is a good thing. They are making positive changes in the community. They are involved in micro-business, and a community bank, which is phenomenal. The initiatve is impressive and i think FIMRC would be received well here. We shall see.

I have a few more sites this week to visit, but then I am pretty much done! So,Ii need to sit down and seriously evaluate everything I have taken in over the past few weeks, and narrow it down to 3-4 solid options. Pray that I make the right decision!

More photos from Paradero,

Home sweet home!

Adios!