DAY 8 Thursday May 21:

Kate…

Because there was no power last night, we spent the night in Santa Rosa.  In the morning, we taught the kids the rest of the question words and asked two boys to come to the front and say a couple of phrases because they were doing such a great job.  Their pronunciation wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty darn good considering how off it was when they first started, so Beth and I were definitely proud of them. 

Today, all meals were at Yolanda’s house.  The Pastor told us she is one of the oldest donors of the church.  For breakfast, we had, surprise surprise, rice and beans, an egg, a sausage, and calala juice!  We LOVE calala juice.  It kind of tastes like pineapple juice but without the tang.  Beth has been coming up with ways to sneak some back into the United States.  She’s kind of obsessed.  After breakfast, we went back to the house, which by the way, is soon to be a learning center, and caught up on our blog!

For lunch, we returned to Yolanda’s house for what could have been the best fish we’ve ever had.  It was called “Pargo” in Spanish, so I don’t know what that translates into English.  After lunch, we took our usual afternoon nap on our wonderful hammocks.  What a life…  Right Dad? J

In our afternoon class, we had a few more people than the day before and continued working on some vocabulary.  We went over animals and food.  A lot of them struggle with words that start with ‘s’ such as snake.  They always want to add an ‘e’ before the ‘s’ to make it ‘esnake’.  By the end of the class, the Pastor could say rice and beans faster than “arroz y frijoles”. 

Then, all of the students wanted to play volleyball with us.  We agreed to play because they said we could play on the beach and because we had not played with them yet.  We were a little surprised with their volleyball skills.  Not as good as we thought.  And they didn’t really play by the rules, but such is life.  We adjusted.  Beth kept trying to tell them that we had to rotate every time we got the ball again.  They didn’t seem to get it.  All they were concerned about was having Beth or I stand somewhere in the middle.  The two gringas in the middle.  Righttttt.  Sounds good to me.

The ball was constantly going out of bounds and one time it went over the wall of a house on the beach, so Beth and I decided to sprint into the water, for the first time, and soak it up.  It was still hot outside and the water was perfect.  Not too cold and not too hot.  Ahhh.

After we went swimming, we walked back to the house and found the Pastor there.  He was trying to set up a skype account, so Beth and I tried to help him.  We were able to get a little bit of a signal from the house two doors down, and talked to my mom for a little bit.  After that, we returned to Yolanda’s house for our last meal of the day.  We talked for a little while with her daughter in law, Rosaria.

Then we returned to the house for our beauty sleep.

Overall, a refreshing and yummy, fish-filled day.