Upper West End (things looking better)

OK so I’ll try to sum up the last two weeks in 6 min flat. Think I can do it? me either....

July 4th, it was all right. Went to Jirapa to spend it with Jenell and the other upper westers but it was hard getting out of James’s village and then getting to Jirapa was a long ride. But it was fun and I got to see Jenell's site, she's the one that offered me to be site mates...but Jirapa is a small city of 15,000 people...too big for me...I def'ly don't want to upsize......

Oh did I write about biking 30 km in one day? haha, that was fun, it was the day before the 4th, so that would make it the 3rd wouldn't it?
Anyway, we had to go to Loggu to ask the nurse if he could help with our HIV talk and James had to talk to the masons about the latrine project. Man did my buttocks hurt from that trip. If I move up here I’ll be in much better shape :)

Ok, the HIV AIDS talk.....Friday, it went really well 74 men and 65 women showed up. We had a male nurse talk to the guys and a female nurse talk to the women. We did condom demos and passed condoms out.
The old ladies didn't like it but the men and the younger women enjoyed the talk. Some interesting questions were raise like "Can a woman have sex after she stops menstruating?" Apparently the women believe if they have sex after menopause they'll fall sick because the semen won't come out (apparently, menstruating helps cleanse all that semen out of their bodies) and they didn't believe the nurse when she told them that they can have sex after menopause. And they asked “Can you have sex when you are three months pregnant and going?" And again, they thought it was bad for the baby to have sex. Now this explains a bit.....Men go after young women cuz women refuse sex after menopause, plus the men pro'ly think the women can't have sex either. And if a woman won't have sex while she pregnant that's a long time for a person to without....anyway, it makes more sense, even if it's not perfect.... So it went really well and made me have hope that I could be a good PCV given a half way decent community.....

Oh and there's a teeny tiny community called Motigu that about 757 people that's looking for a PCV and is connected with the Carter Center so I’ll have more structure and stuff, but I don't know. I need to see it. Who knows? These are all just options. But the technical assistant for Carter Center up here seems to really like me and is pushing for the house to be ready and also talk to John, so we'll see
:)

Let's see what else, oh! We were searching for condoms in WA on Thursday and we couldn't find boxes of them, then this dude at a cell phone store asks us what we're looking for. me feeling safe with a white man by my side (thanks James) tell me "boxes of condoms....we need condoms" and lo and behold, he knew of a place....it's an STI clinic in WA we got 100 condoms for 4,000 cedis...that's basically 50 cents :) so we could give them away and use them for demonstration....just a nice example of how important it is to ask :)

Ok, so I think you can see I took longer than 5 minutes, I added some.....

But I don't know what to write anymore. I feel back to my old self. I feel like I can do this again. Now we just gotta talk to the bosses and stuff......this was an incredibly therapeutic trip :)

Kris