quite the week!

ON MY GUARD
So, as some of you may know, I've had quite the problem with people invading my home. My first night at my "new house", I had people come into my home and go through my kitchen. I yelled out and they, surprised someone was home (I suspect they thought that I was moving in later), left the house giggling. I was too sick with the flu at the time to deal get out of bed and, frankly, wouldn't have had a clue what to do if I had. Since then, I've had movies, a lighter, a flashlight, keys and 3 puppies taken from my home. The lighter and flashlight were taken while I was home but in my pila room, showering or washing dishes. I told Tanya, the president of the board, and word spread quickly. So now we've figured out where everything except the lighter and keys (easier to hide, obviously) are. I already had a little boy return the flashlight sheepishly. I now lock my gate and bedroom door all the time, which sucks. There's also an opening in my backyard to the backyard behind it where the nest of the puppies is. As soon as they're all gone, I'm filling that hole under the fence to try to reduce access to my house. Sucky but necessary.
GONE TO THE DOGS
The puppies have been causing me a huge headache. I was woken up on Sunday morning by a gaggle of children who had burst into my home (one of the only nights I didn't lock my gate. Bad luck!) yelling my name. I crawled out of bed, sad that I was missing my one day to sleep in, to children speaking extremely rapidly about dogs, a guy at the community, Annie and chickens. There were over a half a dozen of them all jumping around, some of them yelling at me, some of them begging me for puppies. After nearly an hour of trying to wake up and figure out what was going on, here's the gist of it:
1) Annie said they could take the puppies on July 20. I thought it was too early, but they fought with me enough that one was taken and the rest were going to be taken this week.
2) Coquette lost her mind and ate two chickens and some eggs on Saturday night so now I need to tie her up in the backyard. (Update: she's decided to sleep in my room at night now, which solves that problem)
3) One of the men in the community bought a dog in El Chal on Saturday and aren't I just the most evil person in the world for not approaching him to give him a dog. Huh? I had no idea what they were talking about since he never came to me to ASK for a dog. But I'm just extremely evil for not giving him a dog. Whatever.
4) "You still don't know very many words in Spanish, do you?" Uh huh. Sorry my vocabulary about accusing people of being bad dog distributors wasn't perfected in Spanish school. That comment, at 7 in the morning on a Sunday after staying up late, was really not appreciated, haha. Very glad I do not know my Spanish swearwords because I suspect I would have gotten myself in trouble.
5) "But I want a male dog!" "Then why did you help your friends to tie on the ribbons onto the only two male dogs?" "But I want one and it's not fair!!"

This ended with me calling my mother and swearing more in a conversation than I have in a conversation in a long time.

Later Sunday afternoon, 3 puppies were taken by two children in the community. After telling some of the kids they were missing, they went on a mission to find them and reported back that the boys took them and weren't interested in loving the puppies or making them fat, just annoying them. Since so many people in the community know now, they'll work it out on their own. I'm trying to avoid getting involved and avoid going to people's homes to retrieve things since it can cause more friction between me and the community. I'm just hoping all of these problems don't discourage people from taking the dogs!

CUSO EXCITEMENT
My CUSO supervisors came last Thursday. Cecilia from Honduras was here for a two days and Mirko was here until Tuesday morning. Carola, from Chile, is the new CUSO cooperant! There's a new pilot project going on with a CUSO-type organization in Chile sending cooperants through CUSO. She's 34, living in Joanie's old house and taking over basically what Joanie and Annie were doing. She has a lot of experience with tourism, so it should be great for the community! She's great to talk to and her understanding of English is pretty good, so we can communicate decently. She's holding out on buying skirts and shorts, but I think I'll have her white legs bared by the end of the week!

The weekdays have been filled with meetings, mostly talking about Carola and the tourism project, which is funded by CUSO. My brain is killing me from all of the Spanish, but it's good. Hard to sleep at night because my brain just doesn't stop translating things back and forth, but hopefully that will subside soon. Having Carola here has helped, too, because she's getting introduced to everything in Spanish. I'VE BEEN WORKING ONE EXTRA HOUR PER DAY THE WHOLE TIME I'VE BEEN WORKING HERE!!!! Annie told me we worked 8-12 and 2-5. Apparently, according to my boss, we finish at 4! So I thought everyone else was skipping out early. For crying out loud. Great news, though! I'm going to see if I can tack on an extra hour and work some weekends so I can get some time off when Mom's here. Not sure why no one told Annie and had her working until 5...And I can't believe no one tried to tell me that we're done at 4. Most days, I get kicked out of the office around 4:45 or I'm the last one to leave at 5. Psssh. Go figure. Something else I've found out is that I'm supposed to be organizing a conference about microcredit in the whole province in November. Good to know.

The best news I got, though, was from Cecilia who is really encouraging us to use our settling in allowances. Turns out I can fix the big holes in the overhang over the front of my house, put a screen on the upper wall of my room that is now totally open for bugs, big and small, to enter my room, and put screens up on my windows. So instead of being a free for all for bugs, my room should be more bug proofed soon!! I need to get quotes and submit them, hopefully getting them approved. Carola and I are also both going to stock up on rocks for our paths to the letrinas and the road. I was so excited to be able to apply for these funds and I told Cecilia "¡Primera, piedras!" I think she thinks I'm nuts for being excited about rocks, but it'll make it a lot nicer.
In our time checking out Carola's house with Tono and Tanya, we heard that Ulysses, the cooperant before Joanie, had a goat that kept his grass short. I LOVE the idea, so now I'm investing in a tropical goat. Stay tuned...It should be around Q300, according to Luis, so it pays for itself since getting someone to cut the grass is like Q80-100. Tono is now on a mission to find me a goat since they don't really have them at the cooperative.

The weekend was a great time. Saturday, Tono took Mirko, Carola and I on a tour of the rainforest. We were attacked hardcore by mosquitoes since it was rainy and Mirko and I both had fire ants fill our shoes and bite our legs (okay, 90% of my bites are somehow on my bum). For a good 10 minutes, we would randomly yell out "OWW!" every few seconds as a new ant chomped on our skin. Not cool. But the walk in general was very good and I could understand 70-80% of what was said. So I'm confident I can translate for Mom when we go on our tour. Mirko paddled us out on a boat once we reached the lagoon and Tono cooked us delicious tilapia from the fish farm. We ate them off palm leaves. It was classy. At night, the three of us ventured into Santa Elena for the internet and to buy some groceries. We had some issues with Spanish vocabulary from Chilean and Bolivian to Guatemalan, but it was all good.

Sunday, the three of us went to Flores to shop and tour the island. And I got engaged! Not quite, but I did buy a pretty jade ring to wear on my ring finger to try to keep people from hitting on me as much. Probably won't make that much of a difference but I like the ring and it can't hurt! So Jeffrey looks like a cheapface with my $15 ring ;) We hung out at the Maya Internacional Hotel to use the internet and hang out. I booked the hotel for Bolivia, even snagging a deal that saves us $110!! Go me. I forgot my bathing suit, so I jumped into the pool fully clothed. Of course, unlike every single other day in this freaking place, the sun didn't come back out after that so I was left shivering in my wet skirt and tank top, haha.

We've been eating most of our meals at restaurants and a few at my place. I taught Mirko how to make tortillas! But all of the food has caused me, in only a few days, to put on a whack of weight. As soon as I saw Luis on Monday, the first thing he said was "Wow, you've put on weight!" That'll make Mom happy when she gets here!

YOUR CALL CANNOT BE COMPLETED
My cell phone is being weird so if you try to call me, it might take a few tries so leave a message if you can since my caller ID doesn't always work for Canadian calls! Texts still seem to work, though. Still the very easy number of (502) 4222-7890.

SPANISH UPDATES
Did you know you can change the language on your keyboard in the Control Panel? Having a Latin American keyboard now has made my life so much better for typing in accents and having the "upside down" question mark and exclamation mark. Very exciting. Just thought I'd share that thought with the world. [Appropriate] Technology rocks.
The language is coming along really well. Now that Carola is here, it should be going even faster. I've been reading the newspaper a lot, talking to people more and more and having an easier and easier time of it. I'm still not close to being fluent, but I understand the majority of what I hear and can communicate pretty well as long as I'm talking to patient people who don't mind terrible grammar. Getting there!