Monday, March 7, 2011

Hogar = home

So I’ve moved! Hurrayyyyyy! I’ll hopefully be able to post pictures sometime, but ever since the unfortunate disappearance of my camera, I haven’t been documenting too much.


My new house is right down the street from my work, and across the street from the soccer stadium. When people here asked me where I moved to I say “the little white house that the Esquivel’s own that the doctors used to live in” and everybody immediately knows where that is. Not that too many people didn’t already hear it from 15 other people. The house is very small, but still too big for my scanty few possessions. The front door opens into a very short entrance, with two larger, rooms on each side. Very symmetrical. The back door opens into a great covered patio, where I’m going to eventually put my kitchen things. There a pretty large back yard, with plenty of space for my garden, and a pila and bathroom/shower about 10 yards away. All-in-all, the most simplest of spaces. So far, I only have a bed and a stove, and the 2 suitcases I brought from home, but I’m slowly building my own space. My Guatefamilia gave me my bed and dishes for free, and I bought the stove at half-price!! Hopefully I’ll be getting a table in the near future, but for now, I eat all my meals sitting on a ledge of my patio, watching the neighbor’s chickens peck around my pila. The thing I like most about my new house is the relatively private, open space in the back. I can have my garden, tan, and shower with little interruption.


The month of February came and went fairly quickly. Our training group all met up for Reconnect on Valentine’s Day, and enjoyed getting to see each other. Other than that, daily life is the same. Sometimes, especially on the weekends, it seems that there are more hours in a day than I really know what to do with. My typical day consists of waking up, going into the office for a few hours or going to the school to garden. Then I head back to the house for a quick lunch of whatever is in the market that day, and a rest with a book or tv show on the patio. After my 2-3 hour lunch, I head back to the office and mess around until 4 or 5, where I head back home to make dinner, hand wash laundry, work out, and laze around. I’m usually in bed by 8 or 9, and getting a full night’s sleep before 7am the next day. The weekends add some variety if I’m traveling, but when I’m here alone, I tend to lay around in bed a while longer, telling myself that I can’t get up before 9 on a weekend. Then I do whatever chores I have, go visit with my host family, tan, and be bored. It’s a very solitary life, but most of the time I don’t mind.


This past weekend, I worked on “home improvement” projects, and was very proud of myself. I’m becoming more like my dad every day. I started my fledgling garden, and have high hopes for constructing a table, if I can find cheap enough wood. I’ve also downloaded the Harry Potter books in Spanish, so that should be interesting.


Ok, so now that I’ve written the most boring blog ever, you guys will finally know how uneventful life here is on a daily basis. I guess that’s what it means to be “one of the people.” We recently had a group of American doctors come through our town, putting on a free clinic, and after talking to them, I realized how different it is to be doing a mission trip and to be living like a Peace Corps Volunteer. There are definite “pros” and “cons” to both.


This coming month, I’ll have a lot more interesting things to tell about. I’ll be going on vacation to Rio Dulce with the girls from the East and some friends of Kristen’s, and will also be going to Peace Corps’ 50th Anniversary Celebration at the Ambassador’s house. Oh yea, and I’m going home in less than 6 weeks. Hurrayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.

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