day 5

*I saw my first big bug today! It tickled my toes while I was eating dinner. Before I could pull back the tablecloth I saw this giant cockroach scurry across the floor. It was fat. Cockroaches in Thailand were also large; they were long and fat. This one was short and fat. And it tickled my toes!!

*I am back to the life of feet washing in the sink. This may sound gross to some of you and maybe I should try to bend in a way that if I turned on the overhead shower I would only get my feet wet (I have no bathtub), but alas, I use the sink. A girl can’t go to bed with dirty feet.

*Today I learned that all that money I spent on grad school may just have been worth it. ;-) I felt like I was in a group meeting at SIT all day; except I was at my new job! And we did exactly that which was done all year at grad school - including sitting in a circle for meetings. :-) And tomorrow, any fellow PIM67s who may be reading this, I have to create a log frame. That’s right. My third day on a job and I must create a log frame. Who was it that said we wouldn’t need to know how to make those?? :-)

*Literacy is something I take for granted. This morning I realized just how important it is when needed to reference documents to create new ones. Translation takes a lot of energy and time. I sat this morning in front of a document I needed to do my work. It was written in Portuguese. Three colleagues and I sat for the good part of the morning translating the document so that we could then create another one.

My job more often than not is working with people whose first language is not English; often they speak no English at all. However, I’ve always had the advantage that the work I’m doing is in my language to begin with. It is a great challenge not to have the advantage! I can nonverbally communicate when I need to in a market or on a mototaxi. I can even point and order food at a restaurant without understanding a word or knowing what the food may actually be :-). But I’ve never had my job depend on my literacy skills in a foreign language. This is going to be a challenge. And a great incentive to learn very quickly! (Kate, I’m going to write all my emails to you in Portuguese so we can both practice! You can teach Hudson & Alex too!)