Happy Fourth of July!!!!

I hope your alls 4th was as fun as mine. This year we decided to try to do a US 4th of July in Nicaragua. It was sooo much fun! My neighbors had a great time watching us as well. I had some volunteer friends over and we facepainted, played games like 3-legged race, watermelon spitting contest, sack races, egg toss, and water balloon dodge ball. It was a blast. We were able to BBQ and make tasty treats we don’t normally get to enjoy here. My host family was quite enamored with the food and kept coming back for seconds! They were especially excited by the rice crispy treats we made! We topped it all off with some fireworks in the evening. We found out one of our friends in Leon lives right in front of a fireworks maker person! Haha.. so ironic… so that worked out nice for us. They were awesome, shot up high and were an assortment of colors… the only problem was you had to actually throw them… that is when the rubber gloves come in handy! The poor parrots freaked out and started yelling ‘You are scaring us’ over and over… quite smart those little fellows. (all in spanish of course)

Our Improved Stove Project is coming to a close. We are finishing up the last stoves this month. The rain has gotten crazy so its been a bit difficult to schedule the rest of the stoves but slowly and surely we are getting them done! I am starting to go around to visit all of the ladies and survey them on their opinions of the stoves and how they were. We are troubleshooting different problems that have arisen with certain stoves, but for the most part I have had really good feedback!

We only have about four months left in service. The group that came in right before us just left this past week. That was really sad. I will miss alot of them. We got to know alot of those volunteers really well and now we are the next volunteers to go. Oh how time just keeps on rolling.

I think all of the rain has made all of the animals very very fertile, haha. There are little baby animals everywhere! My family cat just had kittens… so teenie, their eyes aren’t all the way open yet! There are a couple puppies at my neighbors house that always come to visit me and fall asleep all over the place. They know I won’t hit them… sad but true. I think they have worms though….(disclaimer: don’t read ahead if you get nauseous easily…) One of the puppies had a long white thing hanging under its tail and so i pulled on it… it was a HUGE worm… same length of the puppy. Ew, poor thing. Don’t worry: I wash my hands ALLLL the time. I also got to hold what I think was a baby raccoon.. you can see it in the photo. It was sooo cute.. Sharp little claws and snaps if you hold it in a way it doesn’t like, but pretty adorable. It was crawling all over my shoulders!

I was part of the tech training for the most recent agriculture group that came in. It was alot of fun. We taught them how to build improved ovens, improved stoves, biodigestors, rain water catch systems, and drip irrigation systems. This new group was all excited to learn and learn they did! They will be taking our place as we head out in November. No one will actually replace our specific sites however until the next group comes in… which will be in the following July.

I got to celebrate my host sisters 21st bday last nite! It was a lot of fun. Very casual family dinner of friend chicken and gallo pinto of course! It was nice to be in a very family setting all eating together. We spent forever discussing the differences between the US and Nicaragua afterwards. It is amazing to see what people do and do not know about the US sometimes.

Keep in Touch and I will too!!!!