FIRST DAY ON THE JOB

So today was our first full day in Tecoman. We spent most of it sleeping and trying to catch up on the 50 something hours of travel.

At 5pm we met the group and went out for the very first time!

Okay so let me explain how we do things here. First off we do door to door regardless of what language the people speak. They call this censous work. The aim is to ask each householder if there is anyone in the house or that they know of that speaks english. When you get a yes, you ask to speak to them. If you can, then you do your presentation and record all their details, ie name address etc and that is then recorded on a "map". If they are not available to speak to, then you still take their details and record them on the "map".


Next step is to return on the already censored maps and try to speak just to the english ones, the spanish are already well looked after so we dont worry about them. This basically means there might be anywhere from 2 to 6 english speaking people on a map and you only want to speak to them not everyone else as they are spanish.


So far they have only been able to censor 25% of the territory so there is a lot of work to do!


At the moment we are doing the invitation work so we are only doing the maps that have been censored. We get given a map which is not really made up of streets, its made up of addresses and names. Awesome things is that they actually have street names and numbers here!! Bad thing is that there is no rhyme or reason to the numbering system so you might go from 276 to 4 to 143 to 23 to 887 hmmm yes this makes it a little tricky, they do however keep the odds on one side and the evens on the other, thats a start.


We had a funny experience today. We went to a recorded english house and asked to speak to Juanita. They told us that she didnt actually live there and gave us hand directions on how to find her house. So we went there, nothing, so we asked the person there where she lived and they said try here, giving another address. We went there, nothing. This time we were told to go to the corner and that Juanita is the one that wears the red blouse. Okay at this point we are thinking, ooooookay does she always wear a red blouse????? So we go anyway and when we get to the corner we she a lady in a red blouse sweeping the sidewalk so we veer into the curb only to get a little closer and see that on the corner is a restaurant where all the ladies are wearing red blouses!!!!!! We all just cracked up laughing. Needless to say we never found Juanita.

Im sure there will be many weird and wonderful experiences along the way, which I will do my best to tell you about. So keep reading, you dont want to miss out on anything!