Today was one of my favourite kinds of days.

After the initial shock yesterday to everyone about how much work is going to be required in the next two weeks to complete this baseline study, we got down to the actual first steps today. I say first steps, although the chief agronomist here, and myself have been have been preparing the ground work for months. But today, the agronomist, and 4 other staff who will be going house to house in the target area conducting a survey, visited the community leaders to advise them of our intentions, and to plan community meetings to get local input. The other objective was to familiarize the other staff with the new region, and to introduce some of the concepts of watershed management on the fly.

My big regret is not being able to make small talk in Spanish. I mean I can barely do small talk in English. I can say technical stuff when I have to, mainly because a lot of the technical jargon transfers easily from one language to the other, but this leads people to mistakenly assume that I can also talk about the weather, sports, or the latest local news. Mostly I smile and nod and hope that no one thinks I'm being rude.