Pelucones

So a lot has happened the past couple weeks; I have actually been quite busy.  I guess I will go in chronological order.  Two weekends ago I went to the annual Gala in Bucay (the town across the river from Cumandá, about 6 km from my site).  Every year each town celebrates their founding day with a week of festivities.  The Gala is final big event of their annual festival.  I went with the health volunteer that lives in Bucay.  We got dressed up and headed out to the high school where it was held.  We met up with some of her friends there and danced the night away.  It was actually quite a bit of fun, but it made me appreciate living in BA because all the people there were the rich, Pelucones from Bucay.  Whenever someone learned that I was living in BA they told me that they felt sorry for me that I was living out there…psh I like living in the campo.

I moved into my new house!  It has taken quite a bit of work, but I am officially in my house and out of my host family’s house forever.  The week before I moved in I called up a ‘contractor’ guy to come out and make a septic tank because before there was just a 6 inch tube coming out the back of the toilet.  By build a septic tank, I really mean line a hole with bricks, cover it with concrete, and connect a tube from the toilet to the hole.  After the septic tank was built I figured that my moving out was about as official as it could be so I decided to tell Leonor that I was moving out in less than a week.  She actually took the news quite well (maybe she hated living with me as much as I did?) and was super helpful.  She even went with me into town two different times to compare prices of appliances.  Eventually I ended up buying a mattress, a stove/oven, and a fridge ($775 total…the guy even threw in a gas tank, hose, pillows, and a comforter).  Peace Corps gave me $462 to buy all the essentials to move in, but luckily I have been saving quite a bit of money living in a town of 200 people so I was able to afford the goods.  I also spent a day in town buying dishes, pots, food, machetes, bathroom stuff, a plastic table, etc.  Before I moved all my stuff in I did a thorough cleaning since essentially no one has lived there since the place was built (other than the town drunk that would pass out on a bed frame at night).  Since the house is just a concrete shell there was a ridiculous amount of concrete dust so I decided to whitewash the walls to help cut back on the dust that I’ll be inhaling for two years.  To whitewash I bought a sack of powder stuff and a gallon of glue.  I mixed the two together with water and then painted all the walls.  Even though the paint job is horrible and super uneven, it is amazing how much the little bit of white cheered up the place.  Since the house was empty for over a year, it was infested with bats.  I tried smoking them out by burning trash inside the house at night and I tried scaring them out by leaving the lights on all night, but neither thing worked.  So one afternoon my neighbor, Luis, came over with a spray bottle of some sort of toxin, a ladder, and a long black tube.  He started by shoving the tube into a hole in one of the eaves of the house.  He shoved the tube back and forth a few times and then pulled it out with a bat impaled on the end.  A few more bats started to scurry out of the hole and were batted to death by Luis’s kid with a broom.  Luis then took the ladder inside the house and sprayed along the line of the roof.  A few more bats flew out of the hole outside and a few more escaped inside the house and were batted to death.  After about fifteen minutes and eleven bats later, it seemed as though my house was pest free (other than the handful of cockroaches, a tarantula, and a couple salamanders that I have killed/set free since).  The next night I heard something chewing/breathing above my mosquito net/bed, I turned on my flashlight and was greeted face to face with a bat hanging above my face…oh well one left is better than eleven.  Other than my little infestation, there isn’t too much work to do inside the house except build a counter.  Outside, I will be planting a garden and cleaning up the yard.  Check out some pictures…https://picasaweb.google.com/100931733724063278429/August12011?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCIiogt3J6YyC8AE&feat=directlink

I ran into the vice-mayor of Cumandá one day and he invited me to go into the municipality the next day to meet with the Public Works Department.  In the meeting, they basically told me that if I wanted they would set up a space with a computer for me to work on the sewage system/potable water studies for Buenos Aires.  They just needed a signature from PC so that I could be official.  Awesome, real engineering stuff!  I told Jefferson about my news and he decided to make my life a lot more complicated.  He supported me going to work with the municipality but he wants a contract written between BA and the municipality so that they have an obligation to help finance whatever projects/plans I come up with.  Jefferson basically thinks that I am doing a huge favor for the municipality by doing a lot of work that they should be doing, but I think of it the other way; I think that they are doing me a huge favor by giving me work to do and a space to do it.  So things are still getting sorted out with that, but hopefully I will be working in the office and drawing up plans soon!

While I was still living with my host family, Leonor’s sister from Cuenca and about 8 other members of the family came up to BA one weekend for a surprise visit.  And by visit I mean that all of them expected to stay in the house and be fed by Leonor…I actually felt bad for her.  I went with some of the family members to a larger town about a half hour away one morning to go to the bank.  As we were leaving to head back home, Leonor decided she wanted to pick up some fish at the market.  My host-cousin, the driver, got into the left lane to do a U-turn.  Right as he is turning a motorcycle crashes into the side of the truck, right against the door that I am smooshed up against since there are four adults in the back seat.  We were on the main street in town so there were tons of people that saw it happen and tons of people that immediately swarmed over to the truck and the motorcycle.  A store owner started screaming at my host-cousin and the guy on the motorcycle got up, hopping on one foot because the other ankle is turned the wrong way, with a bloody nose and he started screaming at my host-cousin too.  After about 5 seconds all four of us are out of the back seat, people are carrying the guy into the backseat and Pepito is running after the truck and jumping into the bed as it drives away to the hospital.  Meanwhile, my host-aunt, Leonor, and I are left in the middle of the street in the middle of the crowd of people.  No police came, the crowd dragged the motorcycle to the side of the road, and we started walking toward the hospital (which happened to only be about 10 minutes away).  When we got to the hospital, there was another large crowd there mingling outside and inside watching the guy get treated…no privacy laws here.  After about 2 hours the guy was treated, (my host-cousin had to go to the pharmacy to buy the medicines), and his family showed up demanding money from my host-cousin.  In the end I think he paid them a couple hundred bucks, the guy was fine, just a bump on the head, and we were on our way back home.  No police, no report, just some money.

Random Thoughts:

·         I finally got the seeds for the family gardens from the MAGAP dude.

·         My roof is made of asbestos.  

·         Pepito went hunting for Watusa again, and actually came back with a kill.  The thing looked like a dog-sized rat, but tasted like beef.

·         I moved into my house before my stove got delivered so I ate sandwiches for a day.  Luis came over right as I was finishing my sandwich for lunch, told me that I can’t eat cold things because they will hurt my stomach, and insisted that I come over and eat a ‘hot’ lunch with his family.

·         I went to Quevedo (about 5 hours, by bus, north of me) one day to go to a cacao fair with some other PCVs.  All the high school kids kept coming up to us to get their pictures taken with the Gringos.

·         I got invited to go to an integrated farm with a neighbor and her kids one day.  We caught our own fish to cook, picked oranges, yucca, and pineapple, and made a really good lunch.  It was fun, but the whole time my neighbor kept introducing me as The Gringa (The White Person) and paraded me around like I was her prize pig at a fair. 

·         I went out to a farm to pick oranges with Pepito one day.  The guy paid Pepito $0.50 for every 100 oranges that he picked and he could take home as many as he wanted….now I have lots of fresh oranges!

·         Since I moved into my new place, people in the community keep bringing me fresh fruit…it is awesome!  And my gossip-queen friend, Monica, loaned me a juicer to use while I am here.  It’s no Jack LaLane…but it is pretty darn close!

·         Apparently my house is the cool place to hang out for the teenagers.  They come over to play cards frequently.

·         I use the old refrigerator that doesn’t work as a dresser/armoire.