Hey everyone, I am officially back and working now. I had a pretty smooth trip, except the last flight was a little late and made it so I couldn´t visit my host mom Ruperta in Santa Clara. Oh well, maybe next time I get over there. Anyway, my house was a huge mess when I got back, it was full of dirt and bugs. I killed a ton of little termite-like things and spiders and about 8 scorpions, but I think things are under control now for the most part. I am going to spray the house for the termites because they are munching away on the bamboo in the shower and fence, and they will damage the house soon if they start heavy on that. I got back and my chickens were a lot bigger, and yesterday my hen hatched 6 more chicks! They are cute. I also have to deal with a lot of sibling rivalry from the cat and dog, because they both want my attention and get worse when they are together. The cat always wants to be sitting on me when I´m sitting down, and when I´m not sitting she meows at me until I do.
The day after I got back I hosted a couple of the recently arrived trainee volunteers for a few days, and we did a lot of walking and visiting and playing with the neighbor kids. I remember those days, when I only vaguely understood what people were saying! I am so glad that I am to the point where I can understand and converse fluidly. Their names are Dean and Laura, and they are both really nice. Laura is actually kind of similar to me in her tastes and attitudes (she was also an English lit major). The kids really liked Dean though, even though he could hardly communicate in Spanish and they gave him a hard time for being scared of heights and not coming on our hike to Cerro Plata. They called him Frijol because they misheard and called him Bean, so I explained to them that Bean means frijol in Spanish and for better or worse the name stuck. It was kind of fun being in the mentor role where I knew what was going on and they had lots of questions.
After they left I had a couple days where I didn´t do much of anything. The one day there wasn´t any water and I couldn´t clean the house after the visit, so I just sat around trying not to get dirty because there wasn´t enough water to wash my hair, just a water bottle to rinse myself off with. Then the water came back and I could clean things really well from the trip and the visit. I made some more visits to finish distributing the presents I brought with me and just letting people know that I was back and ready to work again.
Now that it is raining again, I have started to plant my garden. In fact, it is absolutely pouring outside right now so I won´t be leaving any time soon. Anyway, so far at my house I have planted cantelope, tomatoes, cabbage, beets, radishes, beans, green beans, carrots, lettuce, and crookneck squash. Loli planted me about 6 corn plants and some kidney beans in the back yard as well. I am now working on planting my garden up in the monte which is about a 5 minute walk from the house, and I have planted yuca, yampí, and my sweet potato that I smuggled from the US. I still have seeds for cucumber, butternut squash, and a few others that I don´t remember at the moment. So if I get a small yield from everything I should be eating pretty decently. I would love to have more fresh vegetables in my diet.
It sounds like due to my leadership and project management seminar the tourism group is planning on reforming. So maybe something good will have come from that. Everyone keeps telling me that they enjoyed the seminar and are wondering when I plan on doing something else. I think I might like to host a small business seminar or ag biz seminar later.
As a post script, this post is so late because the power went out from the monster storm that was happening as I was typing, so I meant to post it two weeks ago but unfortunately was unable. Disculpenme. . .
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