A Very Wet Week

The best word to describe the past week would be wet. As in, pouring rain, day and night, for five days straight. Which wouldn´t ordinarily be that horrible except that last week I did the equivalent of Latin America´s Habitat for Humanity. Which meant 9 hours a day of attempting to dig, hammer, and measure in what quickly became a mud pit. Since we were sleeping on the floor of a school, there were no showers to wash off said mud. Suffice it to say, I was really glad to get back to San Jose. However, the 140 or so people (mostly college students) who worked in the city of Bataan were able to build 26 houses. 26 families no longer have a dirt floor and walls made of tarp and their quality of life has dramatically improved. Because of the rain, I have no pictures but believe me, it was a pretty big change!

After a day recuperating in San Jose, I came back to San Ramon. Yesterday, I got to experience the family finca (farm). Who knew that all the land behind our house belonged to Albertina´s (my host mom´s) parents and siblings? So Albertina, Daniela, Papi (grandpa), Manuel and Ana (cousins) and I climbed down our mountain, crossed the river and went to have a look at the fields. I was expecting rice because there are bags and bags of it in the living room of the grandparents house but there was also coffee, bananas, cucumber, sweet lemons and even starfruit trees! I had my first taste of milk straight from one of the two (soon to be three, one is pregnant) cows on the finca as well. Then we spent a good 2 hours playing in the river. I had fun until the last ten minutes when a very large lizard looking thing crawled up my leg and I had to be rescued by 9 year old Manuel. He hit it with his water bottle.

So now I´m attempting to plan my lessons for the first two weeks of school, which starts Monday. As it´s a 45 minute bus ride each way to get to the internet, I will probably only be able to update once a week, sometime on the weekend. I´ll try to get some pictures up soon!