We want you to give a talk to the kids...

On Tuesday night I was hanging out in my house with Deivin when my host mom told me that my neighbor wanted to talk to me. I told her I'd give her a call. So, I call and she tells me that she wants me to go with her and the women's environmental group that I've been working with to the high school to pick up trash. I'm not that into picking up trash. I firmly believe in protecting the environment, recycling, reducing consumption of toxic chemicals, etc, but I'm just not that into trash pick up. But, I wasn't doing anything else so said sure, I'd love to go. I arrive at my neighbors house the next day and she tell me, "We want you to talk to the kids". I kind of sat there for a second thinking, hmmm, about what? Then I said out loud, what do you want me to talk to them about? She tells me to talk to them about anything. Them my mind kicks into over drive thinking about all of the possible things I could say to these kids; Finish school, it's really important, wait to have babies, you can love a baby the same in 5 years as you could in 9 months, Go to university, it will open up doors for you, etc. I sat there thinking for a while and reviewing my vocabulary to make sure I knew how to say everything (I did!). So, finally my host dad comes to pick us up and take us to the high school and we end up with 15 or so kids in a room and it's all really informal and she introduces me to talk. This is not my first time talking in front of people in Spanish, but the result is always the same. I totally forget how to talk and suddenly I'm saying things like "castrating dogs is also environmental". I totally forget what I was going to say and just start talking about random things. This time, I gave a replica speech of the one I had given the previous week to my scouts on how it's good to help others. Yes, this is a good thing to talk about, but it was more than just a little out of context. Here is an environmental group in the school that wants to help clean up trash and I'm telling them about castrating animals and helping others. I saw in the middle of the speech that I had taken a really bad left turn so I tried to save it by relating both subjects to picking up trash. I somehow think they were on to me. So are the adventures of a Peace Corps volunteer. We always end up in really strange situations that we are not really prepared for and just wing it and hope nobody can tell.

In other news, for those of you who don't know, I now have internet in my house!!!! I have 24/7 internet and am really happy about it. This should mean more blogs and sadly, it means that I spend a ton of time on facebook. I'm trying to keep it in check.