Laying in my hammock keeps me sane. Cows mooing at my door at 4am, does not.

Let's review the last week:

Last Thursday was Jordan's birthday. The plan was to go visit her in her site, hang out, stay the night, and make dinner. . . but it didn't go quite like that. I met her in San Miguel (about half way between both of our sites and the closest big pueblo) that morning to help her carry some items she wanted to buy back to her house. We were at breakfast and got to thinking that it would be kind of nice if we just stayed in San Miguel for the night in a hotel there, perhaps something fancy, $40-50 a night, and have some drinks. So, we headed off to the closest internet cafe to get the numbers for a few hotels in the area. Turns out, they were all booked solid. Who knows why, but we were bummed. So, on a whim, we jumped a bus to the capital for the night, meeting up with our friend Paul in a well know volunteer hostel for $10 a night, Happy House (and yes it's "happy house" in English). Long story short, we had a great time, got some drinks and drooled over fast food. The capital is such an escape.

Friday I was back in site, doing some prepping for the library training I would be attending on Saturday. Missy had started a library project for our school with Rotary International, a literacy NGO. What I was attending was a training on how to run and organize the library. Rotary will be donating 500-1000 books soon, and it was my job to bring some community members with me to this training program; I brought, the school's English teacher, an involved student mother, and two alumni. We attended the workshop and I think it went quite well. We learned organizing techniques and tackled important questions that would come up in the process of establishing the library. I was able to work with my community members, hands on, which really seemed to motivate them to get this project moving. I hope to go talk with the school director this week about the session and give him some new ideas for the library itself.

Sunday morning Jordan was on her way to my site. We were planning to attend another volunteer's, Emily's, food fair that she holds in her site, in northern La Union, every month. We go to support her community project and to eat a lot . . . well, mostly to eat. Anyway, thanks to tropical storm Alex, the food fair got canceled. So instead, we invited the closest volunteer to me, Erica, to join us at my house for the night to make tacos and hang out. It was awesome to have some good food and other Americans around. It rained a lot too, in fact it hasn't really stopped raining. Jordan got stuck here for another night because of the rain. Peace Corps sent us into "standfast" phase, part of an emergency action plan to keep us safe in case of danger, in this case hurricane Alex. But, from what I've read, the hurricane is past us, moving north to Mexico. The rains are still coming though, so no traveling for the peace corps volunteers for the time being. Hopefully this rain will let up soon and not ruin the weekend plans.

This weekend there's a big celebration for the 4th in the capital. Saturday, the 3rd, the Embassy is holding a party at the Sheraton hotel for their employees and Peace Corps. It should be a blast. I originally wasn't planning on going because of all the other events that I'd been attending, but I didn't want to miss this opportunity to visit with the volunteers coming out for this. I'll be back to real peace corps life next week.

Anyway, I should get back to working on my VRF (volunteer reporting form); bureaucratic paperwork for Washington. It's a quarterly report we fill out on what activities we're doing and how we're assimilating. Should be fun, considering I was only present for a few weeks of the period we're reporting on now. At least, that means less work for me this time.

The rest of the week I'll be cleaning my house and doing laundry. I also need to find someone to help me fix up my house so rats and bats aren't taking over anymore. I have a lot of space between my walls and my roof, where the little fuckers sneak in. A rat ate through my loaf of bread last week, but now I store my dry food in a container that can't be eaten through. I would also like to keep the scorpions out, but we'll see what I can do about that. A few creatures at a time here.