Semana 7

Today is the first Saturday that we haven´t had some sort of training activity in a month I think. It was great to sleep in a little bit, as much as we could. I´m pretty sure Jeff´s host mom was cleaning the bathroom at 5 o´clock this morning. It was still pitch black.

It has been raining here for a week straight. I don´t remember when the last time was that I saw sun. Because of this, I have a lot of dirty clothes. My host mom asked to wash them and I said no because it was just going to rain on them. When it rains on clothes after they´re washed, they smell really gross. But she insisted, and now they have been hanging wet in the rain for about 4 days now, really streched out, probably more wet now then right after she orginally washed them, and they will go right into my dirty clothes basket because they will smell so gross and I won´t wear them. I really don´t understand the point of washing them in the first place.

The last week we haven´t had electricity during the evening. There have been a lot of dinners in the dark. It can been nice however because we talk a lot more. But we haven´t really gotten a chance to use the internet because of this.

Jeff and I are coming to the end of training! We will be here all of next week, then we go and visit our site, Chinandega for a week. We have to cut our trip a day short because the election in the following weekend. But then we are only in our site for one more week, off to Managua for 2 weeks and then living for 2 years in Chinandega. I can hardly wait! I will really miss some of the friends that we have made, but am eager to make new friends that will be living near us. Also we will be living with the director of Jeff´s school for the first 6 weeks. That could either be really good or really bad. I´m going to go with good.

This morning I took my first bucket bath! I just found out that my family purchased a tank that holds water for a week and is connected to the bathroom and the kitchen. The bought it when they found out that I was coming! This is why we have always had water when nobody else does. Anyways, we are staying at Jeff´s this weekend so I took a bucket shower. It wasn´t too bad until I was almost done washing my hair ready to soap up and I looked down and there was the biggest spider I have ever seen, sort of hairy, right behind the bucket. We stared at each other for a minute until we decided that the shower wasn´t big enough for both of us, then I decided to get out. Soap was not as important as my evacuation I decided. Jeff didn´t believe me and went to investigate, but sure enough the sucker had disappeared into the shadows of Jeff´s bathroom, and let me tell you, its the darkest bathroom I´ve ever been in. Neither of us were too excited to use the bathroom for the rest of the morning. The spider was definately not the kind of spider that would die on one smack of the shoe. That guy was a survior, and really big. Ehh.

Other than that, the only really exciting thing was watching monkeys from my bedroom last weekend. Jeff and I could see them playing in the trees. That was kind of fun. Mainly this last week has been a ton of work on teaching, our youth projects, spanish class, and I have a teacher workshop that I am working on for next week. That is really all of the excitment. Lots of spiders and work. Talk to you all soon! Thanks to my dad for the book on Minnesota which my host family looked at for an hour and for the 3rd letter from Paul with CD. Pretty much, Paul rocks! Talk to you soon. Jenny