So…this was originally posted previously. 6/11/07. I have no idea what time. Funny story–you shouldn’t click things in Spanish when you don’t know what they mean. I decided to look up “suprimir” after clicking it. Turns out, it means “to surpress” or “to abolish”. Yeah. Not exactly what I wanted to do. luckily, there’s a back button. Sorry about that.

I don’t have much time since I’m testing out an internet cafe and it costs me dinero (money), but I wanted to share a little about my whirlwind last 24 hours. I ended up going to dinner with my host mom’s family as well, which was nice. It was one of my favorite memories from last year and I especially enjoyed chatting with her brother, who’d been to the US, and his wife, who are both very funny. We got back in time for me to go to what I THOUGHT (for some tonto reason) was a party…yeah. It was a meeting. A very boring meeting. About exactly what the other students are doing while they’re here. I was also really tired, but whatever. I got to meet the new students. Then Juanita and Kiko, a couple I’ll later live with (I think I already said that, but for clarity’s sake), invited me to go view the brand new hospital with them and the students the next morning. What I didn’t know was that also locked me into a meeting with the municiple president.

So today I got to meet the president, see a brand new hospital, return to Naranjillo (my favorite community, for those of you who don’t know my stories from last year–the children of Naranjillo took me straight up a mountain to “see a view” for my camera and it was just sort of magical to be led by children up a mountain with a video camera), discover a track and park to run in that’s near enough to walk so I don’t have to feel like such a gringa running through the streets, eat in a resraunt in Juventino, talk more with the students, visit Doctor Narváez who has an infected heel (?), was essentially force-fed tequila a few times and finally get online now. That’s a lot, especially considering that yesterday I met two huge families, the students and delegation, and the day before I went to Celaya to eat. It’s been a lot of Spanish from a lot of different people in a very short amount of time. And I haven’t been getting my naps, which I had been the first few days I was here. But I’ve learned a lot, and that’s what this is all about. The hostpital is beautiful, though small, and we had an interesting talk with Juanita at lunch about what the guy at the hospital said (that this new health plan that allowed for the hospital meant 90% of Mexicans were insured) and what was really going on (many people still do not have access, and not nearly 90% have health care, let alone insurance). The other thing of interest happened at my host mom’s parent’s–there were a few flies and maybe 2 bees when we started eating. Amparo, my host mom, quite counter-intuitively to what I would do, began feeding them Sprite, which they very much liked, and more came. They kept feeding them. I think it’s really interesting that we have this idea in America that bees and other animals are obnoxious and scary, when here they were saying, “they’re hungry. Whatever. We can eat and they can be here and it’s all okay. They won’t hurt us unless we provoke them, so we might as well live in harmony.” Very interesting.

This is Naranjillo

Anyway, That’s all for now. There will be a lot of water-drinking and sleeping when I get back to my casa…I am exhausted. But I’m feeling really good about the summer, my study and just the people here in general. As we say, es buena gente (they’re good people).