I might be a Vampire

May 15, 2009

Today is a rainy day and I wish that we had internet in the house! Unfortunately, we don’t (we barely have internet in town!). The front of our house turns into the Amazon River when it rains hard and makes it near impossible to get to or from our front door. We literally have to forge the river to get into our house. I don’t want to leave! We have a second little gate that leaves our yard and if it wasn’t chained shut, we could avoid the Amazon, but, of course, it is locked shut.

And we have a bat - or two - or maybe even more. We are not quite sure how many are actually coming into our house, but just about every night in one comes. The bat decided he likes our house to poop in - especially on the extra bed. I have taken to keeping a candle lit at night because I think it keeps the bat from coming into our room. I am quite confident that the candle does nothing, but I need something to help me relax. My fear…thanks to Michelle’s nurse mother… is that it is going to bite me and Peace Corps will have run out of the rabies medicine…or that it will be too rainy for the buses to run and I wont be able to get to the rabies vaccine. Terrible.

I do not know if I should write about this on the blog, but I am going to anyway. As I mentioned a couple of months ago we are having housing issues with the Peace Corps. When we moved into this new house our rent went up quite a lot. I do not feel it is an unreasonable amount, as it seems to be pretty comparable to the other houses in town that are rented out. Anyway, PC will only pay part of our rent (most of it, but Brian and I are pay a small portion out of pocket). This wouldn’t bother me if we had a super nice house, but our house is quite average. I mean, we have bats and a river!! Also, we are being told different things by different Peace Corps staff members - which is just endlessly frustrating for me. What it really comes down to is that I do not think we should have to be paying anything out of pocket or at the very least we deserve an apology from Peace Corps staff members. If you want me to tell you more of the story send me an email…

And a little bit of work info... still teahcing English in the high school. We are pretty busy with them working three days a week. We started our creative projects project in the local elemantary school with 48 fifth graders. So far, things have been going really well - the kids love the projects are they are all worknig really well in their groups. We work with them twice a week. We have also started teaching English to teachers. We have about 26 teachers in the class - so far the classes have gone really well and I think the teachers are enjoying them as well. We taught them the ABC song and they LOVE singing it!! We are also meeting with them twice a week. And finally, we have our Educatodos students - we have two groups and we work them them three days a week. It is pretty amazing how filled our days have become.