I´ve got a parasite and a dirty soccer ball

Peace Corps is so AWESOME!!!

Well, here I am friends in lovely Esmeraldas, Ecuador. It´s everything I could have ever imagined. My group of kids is wild, I got a parasite on day 2, it just keeps getting hotter, and I still can´t make it back to my house in a direct route. Woot! I did, however, manage to find an internet cafe with A/C, muaha! It´s also pretty fantastic the quantity and quality of fruits that I am eating every day. Yesterday I had a banana, an apple, and a juicy juicy orange. People sit on street corners with these carts of brilliant fruits piled 20 high- apples, pears, oranges, starfruit, passionfruit, papayas, pineapples, watermelons, tree tomatoes, mandarins, etc.!

My host family is pretty great. Fernanda and I have been home alone all week (Efren is at a conference in Atacames). We watch "Dame chocolate", the best novela ever, and paint our fingernails pink. Sometimes the neighbor, Clarita, 11, comes over and eats dinner with us. It took some convincing, but Fernanda has finally accepted that I HAPPILY eat cereal with fruit EVERY morning and it doesn´t leave me hungry. We´ve agreed though that on weekends she can make me something bigger or we can go out for encebollado.

And it happened, just like I told Gumby- he´s getting a PhD and I´m getting my first parasites. Lucky Parasite #1 was Mr. "giardia". I would describe the symptoms, but y´all don´t want to hear about foamy yellow diarrhea. Nurse Kelly told me what to get at the pharmacy and the bugger is gone! Now, if I can just get my mosquito net up this weekend I can rest in peace. The neighbor´s salsa music and screaming child bother me not.

Work has been OK so far. My hours are 9ish-1200ish and then 300ish-500ish. Wed and Thurs we have afterschool tutoring with about 15 little monsters. They are all really behind on their reading levels and math too. Big goals right now are for Leidi to start reading her numbers and for the boys to actually start showing up for sessions. I would just like for them to stop throwing rocks at each others heads. Gira is terribly patient with them. It makes me cherish our schooling system in the states. Everything here is based on memorization; teacher dictates, students copy. Hopefully, with time, we can start doing fun things with our kiddos. Maybe get them to read a play, instead of boring texts. That would be fun. Either way, I can see now that work is going to be tough. When I get back maybe I´ll go into teaching but at a younger level that I had originally wanted to. I´d love to get kids when they´re this age and give them the chance to explore and create. Discovery as a teaching method is just fantastic.

My town rumbles and bumbles from dawn till dusk and all in between. There are just people everywhere! So far my favorite activities are riding the public bus and buying watermelon slices on the street. Yeah, I know, "watermelon slices on the street? no wonder you have parasites". Humbug! I also enjoy running across the Bon-Ice man in the park and getting 10cent icecream sticks from him. Yesterday, I went to mail a bunch of stuff and not one person could tell me where the post office was. They just don´t have an extensive postal system here. It´s because no one uses it really! I told Fernanda about how in the States, mail comes to your door every single day, rain, sun, snow, hurricane. She gasped. "And what about packages?" I told her they come too. If they´re small enough, they leave them on the porch, and if not, then they come back the next day. She sat there with her mouth agape. Whether it was the concept of no one stealing the package immediately or the postman charging himself with the responsibility of returning until delivery is complete...she just couldn´t believe it. And so I heart the U.S. of A. for delivering mail in a timely and so very professional and courteous manner.

p.s. If you want to send me maaail, then email me and I´ll send you my address. I think I specifically remember them telling us something about not putting our address on our blog.

´Till next time amigos.