Movin´ On Up

So, yesterday I finally moved into the digs in Habitat (of which there are a couple pictures on my facebook). Habitat is basically like a poor suburb - its quiter than the city, its more of a community, you have to take a bus or collective taxi (no SUVs - pretty sweet) to the center, and its got its own school (Miguel Pro - with whom I will be doing Mes de Mision), but the people live very simply for the most part and it was built by a collective effort with support from Habitat for Humanity.

I think a perfect little anecdote of how I expect life to go is my first overnight experience. After an exciting night of unpacking, moving stuff around, hanging out with the community mates and eating avocado, wheat thins (Christa´s mom brought some from the US), cheese and some grapes (of which I will keep eating and eating until my stomach hurts), I slept well until about 3:30. From then on, between my own restlessness and the gallos going cockadoodledoo all the live long morning, I pretty much slept terribly. At 5:30, I went for a short run, which was both rough, but very enlivening. As I was finishing up, I passed by one of our neighbor´s houses and stopped to talk to her a bit as she was gardening out front. After I nice chat, I went back to our place. About half an hour later, her middle daughter showed up asking if we had a pitcher they had lent to us the other day (I couldn´t find it). Then ten minutes later, one family member (though I didn´t see which) brought over a gallon jug filled with this awesome banana shake stuff. Ten minutes later, her younger daughter showed up asking for two plastic coca-cola bottles (had to be coca cola). Meanwhile, one of my community mates was in the bathroom with a bit of an upset stomach, which I mentioned to the girl. Almost as soon as she left, there was a knock on the door again, and this time it was the mother who had come by to see what was wrong and offerher advice on how to handle a rough stomach.

Wonderful, without privacy, action-packed--I think this is pretty much what life is going to be like.

Other things of note:
- On the way from my host family down here on Sunday, we passed by a passed out drunken guy on the side of the street and the taxi driver and I spent a couple minutes getting him into the shade and getting him awake and alive with some water. Always scary to see something like that - and from what I hear, happens quite often here.

- I have become a baking master. At the host family´s, I made a banana bread, a carrot cake-bread, a chocolate banana bread, an apple banana bread and a chocolate strawberry cake. I have been loving it. The other day I also helped make some ceviche - which is incredibly easy to do (just a helluva lot of dicing) and incredibly incredibly tasty. I have been talking so much about different cooking things and am so excited. I will promise to post about how my X-Mas baking plans go.

- Spent a last great day with the host family and we laughed, talked about the times I got frustrated, talked about all the ¨silly¨ things I did - which to me were just innocent cultural mistakes, but they find overwhelmingly hillarious (like when I say policia with the accent in the wrong place or made some joke about the host father being papasnatas - long story - which apparently means stupid or dumb here) - and went to eat some grilled cow´s heart for the last time with them. I will definitely miss them, but am planning already on doing a bunch with them (including eating Christmas dinner there).

- The former volunteer at Santa Cruz left and so today it was just me. In a weird way it gave me a boost of confidence, though it was also a bit tough to handle at times with the students (who are already sort of checked out anyway). But I definitely comfortable in my own skin there, so to speak, which I think is a real plus.