From the journal of Nathan Sanchez, April 6

April 6, 2017

     Well, that was fun. The meeting was scheduled for right after lunch, so almost everyone could come. I thought most of us would be on the same page about needing to plan out our scavenging missions more thoroughly. Boy, was I wrong. It turned into a shouting match right from the start. Emilio and Javier jumped to the defensive, like we were saying they had done something wrong. That is not what we were trying to say. None of us know what we are doing when it comes to all this survivalist stuff. No one could have known that the place they went yesterday would have a person still alive and ready to defend his shit!

Uncle Ramon

     Everyone ended up yelling and arguing,  for like, an hour. Then Uncle Ramon whistled loud enough for Satan to hear him down in hell. The silence that followed seemed as loud as the whistle had been. He followed up with a rousing speech about working together and not turning on eachother. Then he turned the meeting back over to the entire family with another reminder to talk it out, not shout it out.
     Uncle Nicolás, who is the youngest sibling of Uncle Ramon, stepped forward and said that no one had done anything wrong yesterday. But in the future, we needed to plan out where we are going and think about scouting out the locations for a while before hitting them.
     I stepped forward and pointed out that we had yet to find anyone else alive while scavenging, so yesterday was an anomaly. But we needed to think about how we pull up to a place, too. If all the cars go in together, there was no one to watch the back of the ones doing entry. We should think about how cops would do it. They would send people to the front and the back, but also keep some back for support. Maybe, we needed larger groups for scavenging and within those groups, there should be assignments.
     Maria said we needed to train the people who were going to be a part of the scavenging missions and they needed to be excused from most other duties to be at their best. Her son, Fernando, had been almost done with the police accadamy when the pandemic hit. She suggested we have him train the teams and pass on his knowledge to them. Also, he should be a leader of one of the teams that went out, since he had the most experience.
   

Consuela

      The rest of the meeting went really smoothly. Everyone took turns making their suggestions, Consuela wrote them all down. We decided to have them all written up and posted in the main house for everyone to read. Since we still had to have people on watch not everyone could be at the meeting, this would give everyone a chance to read them. Then we would get together again after dinner and make the decisions about what we were going to do going forward. The people who were going to be on watch after dinner could give someone their vote and have their say that way.
     There were some good suggestions and some that would never work out there in the new real world. But the fact that we were able to get everyone to stop fighting and to come together to look for solutions, well, that was just amazing. Hopefully, tonight after dinner, we can keep it going and have a plan to start putting into action tomorrow.

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