Movin' on out

This past week was our three-month IST, or in-service training. Which meant almost a whole week in the capital (not my favorite spot for the heat, trash, size, and expensiveness). And it meant that we spent three of those days with project partners that we invited to the training, to help us present our community diagnostics and to collaborate to make a year plan. I got pretty enthused about our year plan, and now all we need is for the electricity to be able to enter our center. I thought everything had been resolved when the guys put the inversor in our lab, but it turned out the electricity is entering the liceo (high school) too strongly, and so it's too dangerous to use the inversor or computers still. So we're still immobilized, and have to be patient and wait for it to get taken care of. Waiting is a fact of life here!

My most exciting news from the past couple of weeks is that I think I've found a house. Rather, the priest has found it for me. It's an old casa de campo that people built to get out of the city and hang out with family for a while, and the priest is always over at the neighbor's house who owns it. It's very cute and just needs some things to be taken care of, such as adding a couple doors, repairing one, hooking up the light, and fixing the water situation so that I don't have to haul it (lucky me!). If everything goes even slowly, I could be moving in at the end of this month or the beginning of September. And the two older women who live right next door are sisters who have a great big organic garden, along with the rest of their land. They do have pigs, but I've decided it's my fate to live by those horrible animals. Oh, and one lady is going to give me one of her kittens instead of drowning it, so I'll have a friend and something to eat the mice! Which will be good: right now where I'm living there's a mouse living in my room, I'm pretty sure. Because whenever I wake up in the morning, there's always mouse poop on top of my mosquitero -- at least it's not scampering all over my body while I'm sleeping, though.

While we were in the capital, some of us girls went shopping the last afternoon, and I ended up getting a second pair of Dominican jeans. This means that the jeans are not only not baggy like so many American jeans are, but you have to really work to get them on. With these and all my other pants and skirts that I had to get majorly taken in, I feel like I have a whole new wardrobe! Let's just hope that avacado season right now doesn't engordarme (fatten me up) too much so that I can continue to fit into all of my smaller clothes now. . . I so far have not gained anything and eat lots of avacado every night for dinner: think an entire small one. Some avacados from our trees are HUGE, almost as big as a child's head! It's even better than mango season, I think.