The guest who slept on the other tijera {cot} last night was one of Ed’s CREFAC school children. He had run away from his grandmother. (I’m not sure if I wrote about the evening she & the other members of the family came over to see Ed to ask him to help them find this kid.) Ed had brought him home after he turned up at the CREFAC Office. Ed’s a real father figure for the kid, you can see, and a guy like Ed would be a good father figure for any kid.
The kid went along with us to eat pupusas {Salvadoran snack food} & celebrate Larry Allen’s departure. The most sacred of all intra-Peace Corps rituals has to be the despedida {good-bye party}. It was a mellow fiesta {party} - bittersweet as departure parties have to be.
I was supposed to go to Metalio today, but the Peace Corps pickup is in the shop, so maybe next week. Chico {Rodriguez} had promised me that pickup, but for the umpteenth time promised something he could not deliver.
So I spent another day at the office, reading sociological studies. Oscar, my counterpart, really tore into the Le Baron Association study (a study of sociocultural and economic factors affecting the potential for a big land buying & parcellation project to be financed with a lot of U.S. money). The thing seems pretty qualitative, a little shallow and somewhat stereotypic & even sensationalistic in a few of its findings, but Oscar has found some of their economic indices & methodology interesting. That will probably be the most useful stuff we can pull out of the study. Take their methods and apply them in a more thorough study with more respondents & greater detail in the data collected. Oscar is intelligent & seems to soak up whatever material you expose him to. I think his weak point may be statistics though. He had a heck of a time with some economic calculations Mike Shank worked out. It was simple marginal cost, marginal return stuff, which I looked at and picked up quickly. He finally talked Mike into redoing his analysis in a form which would be less rigorous but easier for those not versed in economic statistics to grasp. He’s a talker, tough to tell what’s pure B.S. and what he’s really sincere about.
I made up a whole pound of rice tonight. Never again, it took over an hour. I fried up a little piece of meat & part of a carrot to go with it. Ed had a visitor in for popcorn & beer, so I scarfed on popcorn too. I didn’t make supper ‘til late and had to forget about getting any reading done tonight.
<I got two letters from Sofia today.> One was very long and so full of her essential goodness it really got to me. I’m not over it yet!
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