encounters with a slingshot

Here we are in El Seybo, on the dryer and hotter side of the island but much closer to inspiring hills that are almost as big as mountains! This week has been a little on the stressful side because of the move: it's hard to get used to moving in with another new family. Although I should not be complaining about my new family at all: it's a house mostly of women who are all really fun. I have three sisters, and two have older boyfriends (think 21/30 and 17/34!!!). My mom has a clothing store that she runs out of a room in the house, so there's always all sorts of people coming in and out, and it's never dull. One of them just got a new baby puppy that is really cute but pees everywhere. We also have a 6 year old boy in the house who is somebody's son, and a 6 month old baby, one of the sister's. The little boy has a neighbor friend who is 6 and sticks to my side like glue. She wants to go running with me and says she can run for 30 minutes. They brought out a towel and copied me when I was doing yoga the other day! The little girl can border on very annoying, especially when she touches me so much and continues to honk my nose, even after I've asked her why she does it: maybe because it's red and grabbable? On Thursday, the first bought of sickness really hit our group: three of our group of 8 were really sick. The worst part is that some of them don't have running water, so every time they would get sick, they would have to go outside, fill a bucket, and lug it inside to manually flush the toilet! I'm still hoping nothing happens to me anytime soon. . . My friend Jenny and I have gone running together and found a nice big cow pasture that's been well-traversed and has some foot paths running through it. After a while on our first run, we noticed rocks flying at us and looked up to discover some kids with a slingshot aiming at us! I yelled at them to not throw rocks, and we kept running. On our way back they decided to be more daring and ran after us with the slingshot. All I could think of were the headlines: Stupid Runner's Body Found in Cow Pasture. We decided to confront them, and had a little conversation with the group of three boys who were surprised we would come and talk to them victory? Later on in that run and in runs afterward, various groups of boys have started to run with us if we happen to pass them, always kids who get tired pretty quickly. They do have feet of steel, though, running through hay like it doesn't hurt their sandaled feet and paying no attention to the cow patties dotting the fields! Friday night I got a new sharer of my house: my friend Jenny, who needed to move. Her house was under construction and had a Se vende sign painted on the front (for sale). She kept interrupting her family's prayer time (some type of Evangelist) which seemed to be all the time. And there were no doors or curtains on the bedrooms or bathroom, which was a small problem when she was bathing. There was a little chalkboard to put in front of the bathroom door, that we've decided is to announce the presence of someone in the bathroom! My personal success of the week: mastering the bucket shower. In Santo Domingo, I got lucky my family there has a tinaco (water tank) on the roof, and the little pipe goes into the bathroom window so that when there's no water (most of the time there), you just take a sort of pipe shower, turning the water on as you need it. Here there's running water but no shower head, so I take a bucket instead. Definitely not as hard as I expected. And so far I haven't seen many floaties in the big water bucket that other people have talked about: so far, so good!