New Volunteer, dancing, and lots and lots and lots of rain.

This will be a comprehensive update. Some interesting things have happened, some less interesting things have happened. I will try and keep my stories as much from the first category as possible.

First things first: I have my camera back! Like 4 months after I broke my supposedly waterproof camera by taking it in the ocean, I got a new one. I would like to thank all of the people who made the waranteeing of my camera possible: Matt and Stephanie (for taking it to the states), Nancy and Caty (for dealing with Costco) and the warantee and mailing it to Brent, and Brent and Shanda (for carrying it the last leg of the journey back to C.R.). Thus, blogs from now on should be pretty picture heavy.



It literally hasn't stopped raining for 9 days straight in Santa Rosa. Ok, that's not true, there was about an hour on Saturday when it wasn't raining, just cloudy. In a town with few to no clothes dryers, this is rough. But hopefully the weather will get better soon. If not, I might go into a depression.


There is another American volunteer in Santa Rosa right now, so I am getting my English-language fix. His name is Nick (see picture), and he is 18 and from Massachusetts. He is taking a year off between high school and college, and decided to come volunteer for two months with Habitat. He is living in Abdon and Ligia's house, so I obviously see him a lot. He is going to be helping me with my projects (including what is left of the school semester for English classes) plus doing a few side projects. We are looking at teaching some workshops on random stuff in the high school, as well as doing some much needed building repair there at the colegio. Also, it looks like he is going to come with my on my next out of the country trip. yeah! We were going to go to Nicaragua, but there are Sandinistas rioting in Managua, so that is not looking like such an atractive option. Then, we were going to go to Bocas del Toro in Panama, but there has been some crazy flooding this week. I guess we'll just wait and see.


I went out dancing in Cartago on Saturday, and it was probably one of the funnest nights that I have had yet. Dixie, Nelson, Carita, myself, and a new friend who I hadn't met previously (who they call Tractor, but is actually named Melvin. I know, weird name) went to las Gemelas and Sunset. I got to practice my dancing abilities, and just have a good time. We got back at like 2 am. I took pictures, but they somehow got erased during the transfer to Nelson's computer process- I guess that's what happens when I haven't used a camera for 4 months, and try to download pictures without reading the instructions.

Milestone: I passed the halfway mark of my trip last week. It's all downhill from here. I have like 4.5 months left. It's honestly been going super fast, and I already know that the rest is going to fly by. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, but I don't think that I am really going to celebrate. Maybe Nick and I will eat a can of green beans or something =)


This picture is of my 5th graders playing a board game about vehicles that I made. It went really well... so I took a picture.