Every time I leave I either leave or try to enter the house the turkey living under it tries to kill me. Have you ever seen a real farm turkey? They are big and ugly. For whatever reason this one likes to follow me and make noises and has even tried to snap at me. I finally go fed up and threw a bucket of water on its head when it followed me into the shower room. That didn't work. If your asking yourself how could a turkey follow you into the shower, you have to remember that the shower, which is just some pieces of metal leaning against a tree with a bucket of water in the middle of it, is also outside. I told my host family that the turkey probably knows that we ate one his kind for Thanksgiving and is trying to get me back.
As far as Thanksgiving went, it was fun. I'm sure there are plenty of other blogs out there that explain the whole shindig down here so I'm not going to go into detail. Most of the volunteers went a retreat type place way up in the mountains where it is actually cold and we ate food, danced, talked, played games, and drank. I mostly hung out with my closer friends as most of the volunteers are pretty weird. I'm pretty sure they have been in the jungle too long. We had the suite and it had an upstairs lighthouse type look out on top where me and a couple other volunteers drank and played music. It was nice. Every once in awhile we would go back to where everyone else was drinking and dancing and talking, and we would get more wine which just so happened to be the cheapest alcohol there for some reason.
My stomach hurts and it has been this way for a couple days now. My host mom's stomach also hurts and I'm really hoping that it is not from the spaghetti that I made for them last night. It had italian sausage in it and it took me forever to get it here and finally cook it. There are no refrigerators so I had to wait around while it stayed warm. Really hoping I didn't poison the entire family with the one meal I made for them. They really liked it which was good but wanted to know where the rice was. Apparently they eat rice with spaghetti here. I told them that this was my meal to make for them so I was going to make it how we did in the states. They boiled some green plantains and put it in theirs. Go figure.
Going to the city and eating real food and talking on the phone with everyone is sometimes not a good thing. Especially when its bad news or things you just don't want to deal with. Not only is it stressful not being able to take care of things back in the states but it also sometimes reminds you of things that you thought you forgot a long time ago. For now I'm going to go ahead and leave that as general as possible. The fact is that coming back into my site after so much interaction between gringos is hard. Going from a place that everything is available to a place where this is no food sometimes, the shower is a bucket of water, and everything smells of mold can make you ask questions like “What the hell am I doing”. I can see why they don't want you to leave your site much and I don't plan on doing it much more in the next couple of months. I do move houses this week so hopefully that will be a little better. I will have my own room under the house and there are only two small kids in the house. It should be better.
I've been crushing books down here. And by crushing I mean finishing about a book a week. It is safe to say that I have never read so much in my life. Books are like currency down here to volunteers and the bank is at the Peace Corps Office where the grand library is. There is also a mini library in David at a hotel we all use and at the regional offices as well. Every time I find books I pick up at least two or three. If I find that I'm reading a book that isn't that interesting to me I put it down. Then after about 30 minutes of boredom I pick it back up and keep reading. This is good because I used to just forget about books that I started and never finished. Here I have no choice. Especially when it is raining which it is most of the time. I have found a used book store that lets you trade in books and is located only forty five minutes from me. This is great because I'm building up a collection of books I've read and can just turn them all in when I'm done. I could actually sell them to the book store but I'm not allowed to make money while I'm here...
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