things

Things I need to get used too:

Oh my god you all should have seen me…I was a frantic wiggling mess….hahah….Really, I couldn’t stop wiggling my body….I felt like If I was moving the roaches wouldn’t want to crawl on me!!!

HAHA I know mom is freaking out right now. ..so we were at the Centro de Salud in Antigua, the big city I’m near. and we were giving “charlas”, lectures, in English to other peace corps people to practice before we gave the real one in Spanish. It was the morning and it was misty and foggy. The grass was wet and we went and got some picnic chairs to sit on….well, there were cockroaches living between the legs of the chairs!!! Of course I saw this and thought we’d get different chairs but I seemed to be one of the only ones who cared! Haha. I got a different chair but the roaches were now in the grass and I could see them everywhere! Ugh….they were just everywhere! There was one on someone’s foot…one on someone’s leg…. Now it’s a big joke that I can’t stand bugs yet I want to live in the rain forest!! I was wiggling so much!! Haha It was funny but mainly very uncomfortable!

Also every night before I go to bed I end up killing some kind of bug in my room. There are so many I’ve never seen before!! Sometimes I call Don Beto and he either kills it or takes it outside for me! Here the bugs are not shy! In the states we have bugs but they don’t like people. Here, a fly will land on your fork as you’re eating!! But the peace corps has taught us how to make a fly trap out of a 2 liter soda container. What you have to do is cut the bottle one forth of the way down. Turn the part you jut cut upside down and place it in the bottom piece with the point facing the bottom of the bottle… but before you do that put some meat or fruit in the bottle. The flies enter through the hole due to the smell and then to get out they fly upward but there’s no escaping!…because the hole is in the middle of the top not in the corner…..I hope that makes sense!
Also we learned how to make a makeshift oven. I think this would be awesome if some women would like to start a business making cakes, brownies, cookies etc….The ovens here are rarely used. I haven’t had one thing made in an oven that wasn’t bought from the store.
We also learned how to make about 6 bottles of liquid soap out of one bar of soap…a nice little project. ( A lot of families don’t like to spend the money on bar soap because the kids drop it in the mud…leave it in the water etc…and they lose money.)
Also we learned how to make a water filter with sand, a cloth and a water bottle…This doesn’t make the water drinkable but it makes it clear. Once you have clear water you can put it in a clear water bottle on top of something super shiny on your roof for about a day and it’s drinkable for 48 hours! Isn’t that awesome!
Next week we are going to field based training and we are going to learn how to make cement…without a machine! We are going to build a rain water catch system, a stove, and a latrine! I’m very excited! That’s a slice of what I’ve been up to.