Fuego!

The weather has finally broken and it is officially summer and HOT! Today is Friday and I got off work at 1. Usually, I do a little bit of paper work, clean my room and then go for a run, but today all I have been able to accomplish is eating lunch and laying in my hammock. With the heat has come spontaneous forest fires. The most recent was right outside our house and caused a little bit of a scare. The boys have been working hard for the last month on the “ronda”, which is a big ring of dirt around the ranch that is void of dry leaves or grass that could catch fire. This is supposed to stop any fire that starts outside the ranch. However, recently the fires have been started within the ranch, which makes the ronda pointless. Instead of going to school, the older boys have been spending the afternoons fighting fires.

Things are going really well with my hogar and I am really getting to know the girls and they are finally treating me like I belong. I still struggle with the language, but I understand about 75% of what they say now. It really depends on who is talking to me. Some of them speak much clearer and have decent grammar, but some of them speak very fast and cut off the end of all of their words. This makes understanding them almost impossible. There is one girl, Saravia, who speaks a little bit of English and really wants to learn more. We spend our evenings chatting in English and Spanish, helping each other. I am able to understand most of what she says because she pretty much knows the depth (or lack thereof) of my Spanish and can adjust her vocabulary to suit me. There is another girl, Jessica, who I am adopting as a special project. I spent one Saturday evening talking with her and she told me how much she hates the ranch and that she can’t wait to leave. Every night she sits by herself at dinner then afterwards leaves the hogar to spend time with her younger sisters. It is very sad and I am determined to develop a relationship with her. We are all going camping this weekend at the Rio Grande and I am excited to get to spend more time with all of them away from the ranch. Unfortunately, this is one of 2 weeks that I am able to take a long vacation during this year and I will have to leave the camping trip early to leave for Nicaragua to do some traveling. You can all look forward to my blog about that trip that is sure to come soon after I return. I am expecting some interesting travel stories because we (Emily and I) are traveling during Semana Santa, one of the most popular vacation weeks, without any hotel or bus reservations….Coming soon.