Miscellaneous

So, here's some amazing things that happened to me this week:

• I got a package from my parents!  It included: coffee, hair products (this salt water is really drying my hair out!), protein bars (these are wonderful for travel days when it's hard to get food), and Lots of TV shows!  Thanks!  

• So far since I've been here I've gotten 2 packages and a bunch of postcards.  But no letters--except for my absentee ballot and other stuff where my name was printed, not hand written.   I don't know what it is about personal letters but they don't seem to make it.  Stick to padded envelopes and postcards?  I don't know...maybe they're stuck in some black hole and they'll show up in a few months?  

• It rained! It rained all night, and all day, and all night again. Never in my life have I been SO EXCITED about rain water.   Did you know this about my water situation?  I only have salt-water at my school.  I can wash myself and my clothes and my dishes and my house with it, but I can't drink it or cook with it.  So I'm forced to either carry fresh water across town from Kim's house (a mile and a half or so) or I have to beg door to door for it.  I guess you could call this Integracao, and it's an interesting conversation starter "Oh, hey good afternoon,  How are you?  How are your children? Your goats? No, I'm not married.  No I don't have kids in America.  Why not?  Oh, by the way, can I have some water?", but sometimes it gets to be too much "Who is asking for water?  Who are you?"  And it can be embarrassing.  Not so anymore!  It rained so much that I was able to fill up bottles with 40 Liters of FRESH WATER!  That's right folks, that's enough drinking water to keep me from begging in the streets for at least 3 weeks.  I would have filled more bottles but I ran out.  I had so much fresh water that I don't even have containers for it all.  This is the best thing that has happened to me in weeks.

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• These babies roam around and sometimes come in my house.

• This baby came back from vacation!

• The students are back at school.  There are about 200 students who live on school grounds in dormitories.  They're bumpin' the jams late into the night and doing their laundry in the breeze way by my house.  They've also been working really hard getting the grounds in shape for the new year.  They've been hauling trash and cutting the grass (which is all done by hand! hard work!).  My school is starting to feel less like a ghost town and more like a summer camp.  I like it.

These pigs roam the school grounds.  Someone raises them in the "back-40" and I often encounter them in my back yard.  This is good though because whenever I have food scraps I just throw them out the door and the pigs take care of the rest.  

These pigs are also the reason my parents sent protein bars.  If you want meat in this country, you either have to buy it at a restaurant or kill it yourself.Sometimes my neighbors buy these pigs and then they kill them in the back yard.  Under my bedroom window.  I'm not super crazy about this, but that's what earplugs were invented for, I guess.