I suppose I should put an update in here. I will just state the facts (not that I have been lying in the past or anything, but I just mean it will be brief).
I went to my site. I met the family. There is a mom and dad, a great-grandma, a 16 year old girl (Cherry), an 8 year old girl (Charon), and a 4 year old boy (Abraham). They also have a puppy that likes to bite, and his name is Benji. My site is in the country, up in the mountains. It is really beautiful, with lots of tropical plants and such, and it has a dirt road. About 6 km away is the bigger town which has about 10 000 people and all the basics (post office, bank, etc). I can work in my site and in the bigger town, since my site has nothing but a pulperia in terms of non-residential stuff. (A pulperia is basically a gas station minus the gas pumps).
Some of the animals I saw: a snake, a toad, roosters, cows, horses, a goat, and obviously dogs. All animals were alive except the snake, thank God.
Some of the things I did: played an entire game of Monopoly, looked at a whole box of the family's pictures, ate hot dogs for 4 meals straight (I have no intentions of eating another hot dog again...ever), watched “in Pursuit of Happyness”, walked through my entire town (the far part is know as “Infiernillo” aka “Little Hell”, due to the cholos and guaro...cholo means unintelligent country person prone to fighting, and guaro is hard alcohol). Anyhow, I also went to the PANI office and the high school in the big town, went to the church, and went to a local Tae Kwon Do class with my host sisters.
Oh, I also negotiated the “terms”, if you will, of my living arrangement. This was one of the objectives for our site visit. That was fun. And by fun, I obviously mean awkward. Let's just say my host dad called the house from the bigger city while he was running errands and asked how much I'll be paying and when. Fortunately, I had already tactfully informed my host-mom that I wanted to take care of my own food, but still. Oh yeah, I might get back on the 16th and find out that half of my room there has been turned into a bazar (basically a dollar store). They're thinking about it.
5 comments:
Yikes! That sounds like a rough situation, Kate, and I am basically praying for a good person to approach you or meet you and offer to let you live with them. I would definitely set a VERY limited time frame for extricating myself from that house if I were you.
do you have to run the bazaar?
i'll help write a bazaar business plan... right along with a somewhat lengthy email, sometime relatively soon ;-)
hmmm i will send you an email, my comments are to flagrant for the innocent blog comment leavers.
now, will this be a TRUE dollar store, or one of those dollar stores where they have stuff over a dollar? those make me soo mad.
on a serious note, can i punch out your host dad?
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