Will anyone ever check this again?

Hello whoever it is that's reading this!

I'm about to make my second post. The problems lies in that until this point in my life, the site has showed up in Russian and I've closed it immediately rather than trying to figure it out. Kelly, don't take this the wrong way, but both of your blogs are failures. Your second attempt has one entry! False promises everywhere!

The weather in Ukraine has been hot lately. Probably not Carribean or Central American hot, but I'd go swimming in our village lake in this weather if I didn't have to worry about running into my 10th form students or the ferocious dogs that guard the entrance. 

School let out May 31, but in Ukraine most of the students are still required to go to school for the next three weeks to work in the school fields and spend hours and hours weeding or picking the bugs off of potatoe plants with their  hands is to kick off the summer season. The Ukrainaian summer season includes more than just work in the fields. It also means mesh shirts and strawberries! Mesh is an interesting fashion to observe on the streets. It involves earing a see through mesh style shirt with only a lacy bra underneath. 

Since classes are over, I'll be spending the summer working at different leadership camps (very similar to what Kelly's doing) and setting up stuff for our resource center and newspaper...and going to America!!!

agreed

Agreed, we need to restart this motha.  How is life heading into summer.... its hotttt here!

someone needs to pick this up

It's almost the end of March and I don't know if ya'll are alive. Please tell me you are. I will post sometime this coming week, so be excited

HAPPY FEB...

So, again I have had technology problems, my computer is currently dead and in the states.... so I know this completely doesnt justify my lack of communication, but a little. Anyways, I am in and around a computer now because I am in the capital because I just finished today my 1 week of project planning and training, and tonight we are doing a little celebrating. I just finished my first 3 months in site, so I had to present a diagnostic of my community and an analysis of my artisan association and write about potential projects, and O man I had a lot. The first 3 days I was suppose to bring my "project partner" but I just brought my best friend from the community Gori, who is like miss Diva, she is 23 and wears tight but awesome clothes and is really outgoing, but did awesome with me on my presentation.

So yea... the training was really great though because we got all these tools and information to help us start our work, and I think I'll be doing everything to designing webpages and making brochures to applying to grants and trying to organize this new sustainable tourism project that is starting this month. So right now I'm pretty fired up about actually starting work on my projects (although some people say the first year is slow), but I think I am going to keep myself real busy. I am also going to be writing on the peace corps kind of humor magazine, which should be cool, we just made a fake mad lib in spanglish the other day in the planning meeting. I'll have to send it to you guys later... its pretty hilarious!

In other news... things are pretty good here. Actually in a weird way I think some stuff is really similiar to katies life but in a carribean fashion, due to the fact that food and drink are EXTREMELY important here, and they have holidays like every week where kids dont have school and its just a big party. People here are also incredibly pushy and force feeding me, but once Im in my own house, i will not mind the whole town giving me free food :) Ill be a lambon as they call free loaders, but it always gets a laugh when I call myself that to dominicans, and since I havent been able to really pick up on dominican humor... I'm gonna keep using it!

See what else... Ive been playing a lot of Mafia lately, but I havent survived a game yet! (Mike you should be happy about this, o and that the Steelers won the super bowl) I actually watched it at the Hard Rock because I was helping translate at a hospital in the capital during the day so I just stayed since the next day we started our training here. Its always fun to have a little taste of America!

Tomorrow I'm going back to my site to start getting to work, but I am excited next weekend I'm going down to the South of the country for the first time, and the beaches are supposedly beautiful and untouched by big touristy resorts. I'm going to be visit Justin, and see his house that he just moved into on the beach! And then on valentines day, a bunch of volunteers, we are all getting together at another beach for a kind of student council meeting but it is supposedly really beautiful and that night we will probably have a bonfire and a pot luck!

Okay well im going to run, but others whats up in your lives???? Let us know! And fyi, I dont know if the rumor has flown around, but I'll be coming home soon! April 3-8th, mark it on your calendar!

Se estrano Uds. muchisimo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Kelly

Slackers

Come on now people, I need some news

Feliz Navidad everyone! The adorable yet frightened looking children above are Rosita and Osman and they are dressed as Mary and Joseph. Every night this past week we've been doing Posadas, which is a pre-Christmas tradition down here which involves dressing two kids up as Mary and Joseph and going around to houses singing asking for “posada” which is like rest or a place to stay. We get sung rejections at the first two houses but then the third houses lets us in where we sing more songs and talk and eat snacks. Its really fun and usually ends in someone falling asleep on me (second picture above).
My fellow teachers and I have also been given charge of directing a rendition of the Nativity performed by our little kids. I think Joseph quit on Thursday and the Angel Gabriel insists on wearing a bunny mask and carrying a sword. I don’t even want to see what happens when we add in the sheep and angels who are all under 6. So we’ll see how that goes when we perform it in 3 days...
Three of the other girl volunteers in my house have lice right now but so far I have gotten by uninfested. One of our nuns just found out today she has the strongest strain of malaria, but don’t worry about me I've been taking my meds. This morning Dan (red head above) went to light our wood stove when he saw something dark in the back which turned out to be a chicken. He tried banging on the top and poking it with sticks but it just kept squawking and wouldn’t move. Finally, to use Dan’s words, the chicken “shit out an egg” and “lunged” at his face, but both chicken and human were unharmed. I think we’ll probably eat the egg.
Well that’s about all the news from down here in rural Honduras! All our big Christmas celebrations will be on 24th because that’s what they do here, and we’ll enjoy the traditional meal of tamales and chicken salad sandwiches. Mmm!
Okay so I wrote that before Christmas but then didn’t get to put it up due to horrible internet connections. So now it is the 27th, I hope everyone had a great Christmas and wasn’t too hot. Oh wait that was probably only me. I spent all day on the 24th making tamales, which are kind of like the Honduras equivalent of turkey after Thanksgiving, I think we've eaten them for pretty much every meal since then. What they are are ground up corn which is then boiled with a lot of lard in water for a long time until it becomes this kind of mush type stuff, then you scoop a bit into a cooked banana leaf with some rice, maybe a slice of potato and carrot, some part of a chicken quite possibly the foot, and some rice, then you wrap it up in the banana leaf and boil it for a couple hours until it’s about the consistency of congealed animal fat. Get yourself a chicken sandwich and a big glass of coke and you’re good to go! Our Nativity play was a very loose translation…Gabriel just sat down in the middle of the stage and watched when mary and Joseph were rejected from the inn, and our little innkeeper kind of forgot his lines and just ended up yelling out “¡No hay espacio en mi casa! ¡Establo!” (“There is no room in my house! Stable!”). But they were all really cute so it didn’t really matter. Well that’s about all that’s been going on down here! Merry Christmas! I miss you all!!