I have two (2) separate rashes on my forehead (fortunately, my bangs cover the worst of it). The first rash is dry, chapped skin from the salty ocean air: this requires hydrocortisone cream to soothe and moisturize. The other rash is some kind of weird sun/heat rash (when I had the same rash on my shoulders and chest, our medical officer told me she’d never seen anything quite like it), and this one needs zinc oxide powder to cool and dry. And of course, putting the wrong treatment on the wrong patch of skin will make it worse.

This week, my neighbor’s pigs have eaten nine (9) of my family’s baby chicks. Needless to say, my family is quite put out by this. My host father has put the surviving chicks in a cardboard box for safe keeping.

I have become my family’s go-to person to fix the DVD player (i.e. choose the appropriate subtitles, dubbing or what-have-you). It’s nice to have a role in the family.

In actual Peace Corps work news: the primary school in my village has a “library” (a locked roomful of books which no one uses). So I’ve been trying to think of a way to get it up and running. I’d heard of a training program that costs $200, but then I heard through the Peace Corps grapevine (a.k.a. the “coconut wireless”) that the Samoan Ministry of Education is running a program specifically for schools that have libraries, but need training. Perfect!

I tried calling last Friday, but didn’t get a very satisfactory response, so I tried again Monday morning and that time I actually spoke to the person I’d wanted in the first place. She said that the program was actually already underway, but since I’d called, they’d put a team together to come in next week! So next week, some folks are going to come visit the school to help clean and organize the books and train the teachers in managing the library, lending books and all those other tedious (but important) elements of running a school library. I’m so excited, but I’m still holding my breath, crossing my fingers, hoping and praying nothing goes awry.

The trouble is that, as far as I can tell, I’m way more excited than most of the teachers. So, whenever I tell someone about it or talk about it, I try to smile a lot and act really happy, in an effort to convince them that, yes, spending three to four days cleaning and organizing a dusty old room of books will totally be fun and they should be super pumped about it. (Wish me luck.)

And yesterday, some people from the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology came and visited our computer center. They brought back our printer/copier/fax and a new keyboard for one of the computers (so we now have four out of five working computers!). They also showed me that the tele-center includes a projector and screen! (The women's committee was totally holding out on me.) This has amazing possibilities, including, but not limited to, weekly movie nights...