the end of may...

wow so i realized that with all the free time that i have on my hands i really shouldn´t be falling behind so much on my blog, but lazyiness is some what contagious and when i get to be a little bit lazy, it seems to turn into a lot bit lazy. so i´m going to break that trend and fill you in...

Last weekend, i took a few of my ´mental health days´(we get to take 6 mental health days and travel to bigger cities or visit friends) and went to Riobamba to stay with Ana for the weekend. my day started at 5:30 am when my counterpart calls me to tell me that he´s leaving, right now, for riobamba to go to some meeting for the co-op and wants to know if i want to go. some how, in my state of delirousness, i said yes, i want to go cuz i´d already been planning on going to Rio and in a car is always so much easier than a bus. but after i hung up the phone, realized it was 5:30 and i had nothing packed, needed to shower and really didn´t feel like rushing around (or riding in a car with him and his amigos for 3 hours) i called him back and declined his generous offer. Needless to say, i made it to riobamba with the bus around 1 and first things first, i went straight to a laundry mat and dropped off my clothes. yes, i hauled a potatoe sack full of clothes on a 4.5 hour bus ride merely so i could have them washed and DRIED. plus its really intimidating to see and trash can full of clothes and to actually find the drive to wash all of them by hand...as i said before, the laziness is spreading...

the weekend was a lot of fun and defiantly well needed. ha it made me realize how sarcasticly bitter i have become :) there´s about 5 other volunteers that live around rio and they usually come into town for the weekends and one volunteer lives downtown Rio so we hung out at her house on friday and saturday night and went out to the bars and had somewhat of a normal weekend. i spent WAY too much money. but when you´re deprived of variety of foods, its like being a kid in a candy shop and having way too many choices. needless to say, i spent $5 on a chicken burrito, with guacamole and it was incredible delicious.

Ana lives in an indigienous village about 20 minutes above riobamba and the king of her village was in town from quito for the weekend so i got to meet him which was awesome and he invited us to come stay with him in quito anytime we like, or to visit his mother who is a little crazy and has a giant house on the beach. but ana lives in the king´s house which is empty unless he´s around and it is defiantly one of the nicest houses i´ve been in in Ecuador. i´m a little jealous, but i´m really starting to appreciate the gaps between my walls and ceiling because it just means that all the giant bugs that get in and get out just as easily.

so the weekend was good. i left rio about 3 in the afternoon on sunday and bought the last ticket for the bus that left at 3 which is good because the buses wait until they fill up or they´ll stop continusouly to pick up ppl on the road, so if you have a full bus you´ll get to where you´re going a lot faster. but anyways, i bought the last ticket, the bus is packed, i walk to the back cuz i have seat number 43 and of course, there´s only 42 seats. awesome. i get to stand for this 5 hour bus ride. but much to my dismay, after an obnoxious amount of flattering words and wistles from a rowdy group of somewhat drunk men in the back, one of them offers to let me sit on his lap. literally about to loose all of my patients, i went up and talked to the driver and asked him where my seat was, and he looks over and is like, íts right here in front with me´. GOLDEN. ha i´ve always wanted to ride in the front seat. but then some jerk from the back comes up to the front, is complaining about something, squeezes into the space between the driver and i (which isn´t a seat at all) and just makes himself all comfy and pisses off the driver so that he pulls over and starts yelling at the man in between us. i thought there was going to be a fight but instead, the bus driver calmly looks over at me and says ´there´s a seat in the back, would you mind sitting there?´ of course, i said ´sure´ which sucks, i told should´ve said no, this is my seat but being the passivist that i am and just being happy that i understood what he said to me and not wanting to be a problem, i went and sat in this other guys seat. which, of course, was in the second to last row, right in front of the drunk man who wanted me to sit on his lap. needless to say, i arrived safely in Cumandá after about 4 hours of pretending to be asleep.

this week i´ve been somewhat working, mostly just spending time online. i realize i spend a lot of time online. way too much. but i´m working on a project of putting computers in all the schools of the county of Cumandá and i´m really excited because i found a company in seattle that is going to work with me and they sell refurbished computers for $25 a piece. so now i just need to figure out to get the funds for that. i´m working on a couple of local grant programs and then there´s also a bunch through peace corp that i can do so i´m pretty excited cuz what seemed impossible is looking somewhat possible.

but of course, my counterpart has ditched me for the past two days and i haven´t had a chance to tell him of the computer offers. yesterday, after waiting at the office for 20 min and him not answering my call, i walked to an internet cafe and saw him in the street and we just greeted each other and went on our ways. lol i really don´t understand sometimes.

this weekend i am staying in Cumandá. i´m not quite sure what i am going to do with all my time but i´m sure i´ll find something. yesterday i made chocolate chip cookies which turned out okay. the little kids loved them. my 3 year old neighbor girl ate four of them and her mom didn´t care but today she didn´t go to school because she was sick and not feeling well. hmm...odd. oh wow, also, this is the same little girl that had a 104 temp last week and all that her mom and Melita would do was rub an egg over her which is supposed to remove the demon thats making her ill. they did it three times and her fever would not go down. i was basically begging them to just give her some non-aspirin. instead they wrapped her stomach with lettuce leaves, put a mashed up potatoe on her neck and put fried onions on her feet and wrapped them in newspaper. i know i don´t understand the purposes of these remedies but really, just give her the aspirin and let her rest!

but yes...thats the last of my rants. anyways once again this is long, but before i go, i posted a photo album that my friend mitch put up on facebook on my profile. its got some good pictures of our swear in ceremony and our last week together in Quito when we were locked in our hotel because of the elections.

welp, its 9:45 friday morning and i´m not quite sure what i am going to do with my day. maybe i´ll call my counterpart again. maybe i´ll help Melita make lunch. maybe i´ll escape to Guayaquil. oohh the possibilites are endless. hope you all had a great memorial day weekend!!! my friends Ali and Eileen called me on skype and sang me America the beautiful and it has been stuck in my head all week. thank you for that. I hope that all is well!!