Le ha tocado lavar en la calle!

My outdoor sink is fixed, and water now runs in it nearly all the time. This is a huge and wonderful event. Now I can wash my dishes and clothes a foot from my house, instead of down a hill surrounded by kindergartners whose classroom is behind the big family sink I used to use. The only flip side is that my outdoor sink is very close to, and highly visible from, the main road. So close that when my counterpart saw me washing clothes yesterday, she burst out laughing and crowed, "Le ha tocado lavar en la calle!" ("You have to wash your clothes in the street!") Then she and her daughters came back and decided to have a long chat with me while I was washing my underwear. Awk-ward... As if my privacy isn't being invaded enough, there is also a running joke in my host family that I'm going to bathe up there in full view of everyone. Not gonna happen, y'all. My working pila is part of a village-wide project to bring more running water to more houses. Some houses in my village almost never have water during this, the dry season. But now that situation has been improved if not fixed completely. The project was funded by the municipal mayor's office, so I can't be mad at the mayor anymore for screwing me over. That's right. We were counting on her to provide our school with two buses so we could take grades 1-3 to the zoo. The zoo had already agreed to get us in for free and provide a guide and all the teachers were really excited about the trip (they hadn't told the students yet, thank God, except one who told her 6th-grade class they were definitely going even though a) it wasn't confirmed b) 6th grade wasn't invited and c) she told them we were going yesterday. But of course this teacher passed the whole thing off as my excursion, so I had to deal with the disappointed 6th-graders running up to me in the streets.) Anyway. The mayor said she would let us know last Friday if our solicitud was approved, and when no one had called by yesterday I suspected the worst. So I called her and when the first words out of her mouth were, "fíjese que..." I knew it was all over. Peace Corps volunteers have a special loathing relationship with fíjese que. It loosely means, "Look, the thing is," and it is the beginning of every sentence uttered by every person in any position to help us out. After that, it hardly matters what lame reasons they have for not giving their time and/or resources. Half the time it's just lame excuses anyway. But like I said, I can't get too mad when I think about the water in my pila. We can always postpone the trip and try to do it later with Peace Corps money. The federal government agency for agricultural technology is being way more helpful. I spent basically 8 hours on buses today just to meet with one of their engineers, and he is going to help me set up an orange and pineapple nursery for our school. And by help, I mean he is going to come to my site and train the parents and older kids himself. It's up to me to work with the parents to get the land and materials, to plan the logistics of the training and to help the kids actually plant the seeds. But I really have no idea how to set up or maintain a nursery, so this will be a huge help. The first meeting in about a year of our community development organization's board of directors is tomorrow. I called the meeting to see if they wanted to do any work at all anymore. I am betting the answer is no, and no one will come, even though I will clean my house and buy them all soda. Paz y amor.