What do you do actually do there?

To be honest, in these first couple of months I've asked this question myself a lot of times. Things are finally starting to come together, though, and I'd say I more or less have four main work areas.

1. Like my program says, my technical title here is a Sustainable Community Tourism Facilitator. We're working on getting funding to build a visitors' center in our communal forest and staging a cleaning campaign to make an interpretive trail in a really pretty area people use right now to throw their trash. Sometimes I do other random things with tourism too-- for example, a group of girls from Xela came to help clean up our hot springs area on Sunday and so I coordinated that.

2. Environmental Education. I still work in one middle school twice a month teaching environmental ed. We're also recieving books for elementary school teachers and workbooks for all elementary students from a Swiss NGO-- 3,000+ students! I presented a plan for implementing this at a meeting of all the school directors on Friday and am going to a a workshop this upcoming Friday to get the books and learn how the NGO wants us to train teachers to use them.

3. Trash management. Our office is working hard to set up recycling and a sanitary landfill in Cantel. My program director at Peace Corps knows more about trash than anyone else I've ever met, so he's helping us out quite a bit. The mayor seems receptive, which is great, and I think more than anything else this would be a big help for Cantel. It's still in the veeeeery beginning stages, though, so we'll see how it goes.

4. I haven't actually started yet, but on Saturday, a youth group that my counterpart is involved with is having its last workshop with middle school kids on citizenship participation. Our idea is to get these kids to form an environmental group. We could do summer-camp type activities, leadership, etc. I'm hopeful about this too and I think it could be a lot of fun.

Other than that, I still spend a lot of time cooking with people, hanging out with my host family, and teaching English to kids and to a guy in town who won a scholarship to Canada but doesn't speak much English. It's crazy to think that I've been in Cantel for almost four months now and am glad to see that work is finally starting to come together.