July 3, 2008
Cleaning the “cancha”
Last night as well as tonight I rallied up about 10 youth to clean up the almost demolished basketball court in the elementary school. Apparently the school was being remodeled last year but the engineer mysteriously disappeared (with the money I’m sure) halfway through finishing up. Well, actually it doesn’t look like they did much but put up a wall made of huge cement blocks around school. They left an unfinished classroom with just the walls up and a torn up basketball court. The workers were using the floor of the court to mix up the cement and decided to leave the rocks and pieces of cement on the court. Which means that throughout the school year kids were playing on that court, sliding on the rocks and sand and grating their skin off. An image would always come to my mind whenever I would see these kids fall, a cheese grater, but only it’s not cheese being grated but skin. Gross.
Anyways, we spent hours cleaning all that rubbish. So now that we have a semi clean/ and not so dangerous basketball court I can start my youth volleyball team. Just another project I can add to my project list.

July 4, 2008
4th of July Peace Corps style















Umm....ok this was a Mana concert last month but, who has fireworks after a concert?! I have spent this independence day in the campo, teaching english, cooking rice and beans, drinking coke/brugal and dancing Batchata and Mernengue. Well, not in that order. It’s been a good day.

Mangos
So many mangos. It is mango season and I have been eating mangos like it’s nobody’s business. My frigde is full of mangos. The mango trees are full of mangos. I've been hit by a mango falling off of the tree several times. They fall hard. The pass time here is eating all the mangos that have fallen off of the tree and then watching and waiting for more mangos to fall down. Yeah sometimes that can get pretty boring for me. I am pretty lucky because people come to my house to give me bags of mangos. I'm sure they say something like, the Americana loves mangos.