Life in the Campo

Hello! I decided to use blogspot because I remember reading a lot of useful PCV blogs before I left. The time before you leave for PC is full of a thousand unkowns and those blogs helped to illuminate some of them. Hopefully, this blog will prove informative, hilarious, heart-warming and outlandishly awe-inspiring...or at least something to read when you´re bored. I probably should have started this on here instead of myspace, but I didn´t soooo get over it. My site is located in Puntarenas, Costa Rica about 2 hours from the border of Panema. I have been in-country for 3 months, but just recently arrived at my site a few days ago. My host-family is wonderful and my host-dad looks like a Costa Rican George Clooney. He shimmys up avocado trees and sells scrap-metal to Panemanians. They own a lot of land here and have 25 cows which he (and sometimes me) drives up the mountain everyday. Yesterday, we went on a ¨walk¨which turned into a 3 hour death march (lolz!). We got to see monkeys (which he called making a kissing noise), those crazy neon green frogs, and a small dog that was eating an iguana. We then ate mangos in the pouring rain after my host-dad made a make-shift sack out of his T-shirt. It is crazy going from life in training to life at your site. Training is very American, in that there is a daily schedule of things to do, and places you have to be, for pretty much all of the day. Also, the last week of training is absolutely packed with things to do (we got to meet Oscar Arias!) and then POOF!... you´re in your site. Every day YOU decide what you want to do and who you want to talk/meet with. This week, I have been working at the school during the days and going to meetings/playing soccer in the afternoons. Next week, my counterpart and I are going to San Jose to meet with ICE (government phone company) to see about getting phones in our town. I have been getting up at 5 every day to go running and this has proven to be a good way to meet people in the town. People are usually biking to work at this hour, or walking to catch the bus to colegio (high school). HOWEVER, this morning I had to go to the bathroom baaaaaaaaaaaaadly and when I got home the door was locked. I had to go so badly that I ended up pooping outside, using leaves as toilet paper, and hiding the poop on the other side of the fence under a bush. As all this was happening, I was thinking, ¨I wonder what I would be doing right now, if I were back home.¨ That is all for now, friends. Bill