Gettin´that gold!

During off season my community pans for gold.
Me! Panning for gold!

Little guy

Passion flower growing off my dugout canoe garden

My host mom for the month of July chats about...primarily me. Her name is Zuleica and she´s a little hard to hear, plus she´s only speaking in spanish, but enjoy!

The ladies in my village practicing a dance around dusk...a little dark

Whew! What a month!

These days I spend a fair amount of time thinking about all of the awesome things going on in site that I would love to tell other people about. I'm not so great at paragraph writing, so I think I'll make a list, as I am so fond of doing in all areas of my life.

1) I was sitting with a young woman in her hut the other day while she was rocking her one year old in the hammock, when the baby suddenly started to pee. The pee of course went straight through the cloth of the hammock and due to the heavy swinging motion she proceeded to draw a straight line around 1 2/2 meters long on the ground...with her urine of course.

2) The little boy who lives across from my house seems to pride himself in finding places that I will least expect him and then trying to get my attention. He is 3, and typically all that he wears is a string tied around his waist where there is sometimes attached a loin cloth. Once he gets my attention, he becomes so overwhelmed that he has trouble breathing a little bit and sort of makes these half laugh, half gasping noises as he climbs the ladder back up into his house, turning his head to look at me again about every 2 steps just to make sure I'm still watching.

3) I was asked the other day if I knew what an airplane was.

4) I was lucky enough to get to watch Lionheart staring Jean-Claude Van Damme 3 days in a row. Possibly the best of the 3 times was on the third day when we merely fastforwarded through the entire thing, but in the slowest setting possible, which condensed it down to around 15 minutes.

Last night...we watched Torneo de la Muerte, which I believe was filmed in 1964.

I think that's about all I'll say for now.

Part of my village on a cloudy morning.

Standing in the tourist house looking out at the river during heavy rain.

This is one of the lessons in the book the children in my school are given to learn english...awesome.

Frog in the water

Boat ride out of my site early in the A.M.