Pazitively Loca: Quick update before I go to the Motherland!

So this will probably be my last blog post for a week or two and I'll warn ya, the next post will be all the food I eat in the US...

It's weird, a week in half ago I was totally checked out from work and all things Peace Corps related because I was so excited to go home. Then I started making a slideshow of pictures from my service so far and it almost brought me to tears!! Wtf!!!
No but in all seriousness I do love it here and my new site is totally to thank for that. I had dozens of people tell me that everyone who gets a site change loves their new site and I somehow couldn't believe them. Guilty.
I am nonetheless ecstatic to be going home even though theres a lot of snow. It's only 2 weeks, right?! and then I'll be joining all of my fellow PCVs in Cabarete for a few days at the beach to ring in the new year.

So real quick, on Thursday we participated in an activity in Santo Domingo put on the PNUD, which is the United Nations development agency. The objective of the activity was awesome- instead of just throwing money at what they thought was necessary, the invited actual cacao producers, the farmers, to the activity to get their opinion on what is needed to make the cacao industry successful and sustainable. In addition to producers there were buyers, development workers (like myself), cooperatives and management companies, among others. We chose what theme we wanted to work with, broke up into groups and created objectives, goals and indicators. I obviously chose social and economic sustainability. At the end, we presented our findings and agreed to continue meeting monthly in Santo Domingo until July in order to put together the framework for the platform of the project. Super exciting.

Andres, Ramon and Juana (cacao producers) participating in the activity.

Frank (the new president of the cooperative) and Angel (our accounting/sales guy and my project partner) participating in the accounting activities.

That night I stayed with Lucija, our FSO that we stayed with on Thanksgiving. With the little time we were together we went down to the park on Bolivar to check out the Christmas lights. I have NEVER seen lights like this!