Life life life :)

Hello!

I am in my third week here in Santa Ines/Tena. I am beginning to feel very comfortable here. I have made some good friends (or as good of friends as you can be for knowing each other for 3 weeks) and have had some very very interesting experiences here. I have eaten worms, snails and cow head now. The cow head was more funny than anything. We were sitting in our kitchen when someone came to the door, theY brought a freshly chopped off cow head as a gift to my family. I am not talking a nicely precerved lets through that puppy on the wall type of cow head, I am talking brains basically falling out, tounge hanging out and eyes still open. Yeah, that was a shocker haha. It just was sitting on our kitchen counter for a while....then got moved to the backyard....then we took it with us to a birthday party in another town (yep, cow head in a bag on the bus)...finally they cooked it and we ate it. Well, I tried to eat it but it is tough tough meat, I missed out on the brains, I guess that the brains are a softer and easier to eat.

I have about 1,000 stories to share about my experience here but am not sure how to reley them to the masses. I am sure that when I get home they will just kind of come out randomly. I will share one right now though, just to keep people updated a bit.

I went to a birthday party with my host family this past Sunday. It was a very fun experience with very fun people. The interesting part is that the man of the house so to speak is an old shamin man. We were walking aroud his garden and he was explaining to me all of the different medicinal plants that he has and how he uses them. Well, he decided that he wanted to cure me of all my problems and suffering. I guess he is saught out by many people and people in the community often say he does not live there or is dead so that people leave him alone, he is going to Texas to do some work there soon. So basically, he has had an incredible amount of experience in this work. We went into a room and had me rub a candle all over my body which he then lit, he started asking me all these questions and filled up a cup of water and put in my palms, blew smoke into it and then started to ask me more and more questions about my health. Some where questions and some were more like tellling me what has been wrong with me. He told me to turn over and lay down...he then plunged at my lower back and started to suck really hard. Quickly after he began almost vomiting into his hand, his hand was then full of blood that he poured out onto the ground. He told me that it was my bad blood coming out. He did the same thing on my front. That was a very new and different experience for me, partly because I was alone with him and not always sure what he was saying (old man Spanish can be very hard at times) and then suddenly I was getting flipped around and sucked on. He did a few more test type things and then we went back to the party, for me to be cured later. The party was incredible. Dancing like no tomorrow to all types of music. Cousins dancing with cousins like people dance at the clubs haha. It was great!! Ahhh so fun. I wish I could describe. But then, I was taken back to be cured. He spit many things on me made from plants and did more things with smoke and in the end sucked more blood from me. By the end of the curing he could no longer suck out blood which meant I was clean from whatever it was that was making me bad. To finish it off I had to drink a remedy made from a very intense plant, I know cannot take pills or drink for 8 days. My new friends (it is their dad) were sharing stories with me of when they had bad blood and different other problems that their dad fixed. It was reassuring to hear of other people going through this. My verdict is still out on the experience, I am very glad that I had it. It was incredibly different from anything else I have EVER experienced that is for sure.

So that is one new story I thought people might be interested in. I know for me it was very new anyways. May tales from the jungle continue! :)

I spend most of the week teaching. I teach 2nd level through 7th level everday a 1/2 hour each class. Let me just say...1/2 for a class IS NOT ENOUGH. Also, I understand why it is a problem to have a large class size, it is impossible to know if every child is grasping the concepts or the pronunciation AT ALL. It has been a good experience so far, I have a lot of respect for teachers thats for sure. I try to do different activities everyday and I try to keep an open chill vibe in the classroom. I have been very interested in breaking down the teacher student dichotomy by asking them to teach me words in Kichwa or in Spanish. The goal being to decrease the idea that the teacher is the one who knows and students are the ones who don´t know, because that simply is not the case and does not encourage learning. That has been going well, the students get very excited to learn and to teach. They are very courious. Sadly, 6 weeks is just no time at all for a language and in the end they will know how to say somethings but mainly vocab and simple ´hello my name is´ type stuff. For the younger ones who knows if we will ever get past numbers, eek. Yet another learning experience :)

My health has been more or less which has been kind of hard here. Currently I feel healthy though. We don´t have running water the vast majority of the time and it is not fun to be sick (that kind) without running water. Also without a shower, lets just say....I was feeling fairly gross. We also buy meals one by one because there simply are not the economic resources to have extra food in the house at all. So, I was feeling very weak too. I had a low phase in there as well, my host family is great as a whole but my host mom is not that motherly with me so I felt pretty darn alone while sick. But, things are really turing around. I went to a coworker of mine´s house and got to know his family which was great and like I said I have been making more friends here and have things to do on weekend nights and stuff. We go out dancing and it is a blast. That is something that I will miss an incredible amount when I return, all the dancing! Sure we have places to dance in the states but firstly, sorry guys, men dont dance in the states! They stand there. It is so fun to be met in the middle and actually dance! Secondly, the dances here cumbia, salsa, merenge, everything are just so fun to learn!! I suck of course, but people are patient with me and it is just great.

Moral of the story, it will be very hard to leave this part of the program in May while at the same time it makes me miss home more than Quito ever did or could. Yahoo for crazy life experiences :). I hope all is well wherever you are reading this!!