You have many beautiful things

Number of ticks removed: 54
Days tick-free: 0

I feel like all I’ve been doing lately is complaining, and that is not how I want this to be. I keep reminding myself of what this little boy Eduardo said the other day. Eduardo is one of the local children who is part of a project where he works here 1 day a week and attends an hour of English lessons Monday through Friday. One day as he was sweeping the porch, Eduardo peered into our room and said, in an awed tone, “Tiene muchas cosas bonitas.” Roughly translated as, “You have many beautiful things.” Its true, I do have many beautiful things. Not just the things sitting on the shelves, other things that you can’t see. Such as a year on this beautiful island, plus friends and family back at home who will be there when we return. So I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m complaining too much—I do know that I have many beautiful things.

On Tuesday I stayed in with the toughness tester in the morning, and in the afternoon I biked over to the beach at Santa Cruz. I think I needed that, to renew my faith in the island. With the road repaired, its a 25 minute ride through volcanic beauty. At the beach, I found that the shore was lined with thousands and thousands of teeny tiny frogs. They were seriously small, only about the size of this line: |___|. Seeing them served as a reminder that even though the lake looks like an ocean, it really is a lake.

I was back in the forest on Wednesday and Thursday. Both were extremely frustrating days, especially Thursday. In the early morning hours, we had a thunderstorm that dropped over 7 cm of rain on me, and I was soaking wet for the rest of the day. I think the monkeys get weird in the rain. They were so spread out, and it was hard to know what was going on. Finally I settled on an adult male from the South group, or so I thought. He hung out by himself all day, about 10 to 20 meters away from a small subgroup of other South monkeys. About 5 in the afternoon, he took off up the volcano. I’ve been with the South group in this area of the forest before, but I had this sinking suspicion that something crazy was going on. Most of the rest of the South group was far down below. My gut tells me that this male was not actually in the South group: either he was some kind of loner or maybe he was part of another group but he just happened to be hanging out in the South range all day. I’ll never really know, but I suppose I should re-do my observation of a South group male for this month. The thought of this was too much for me to bear yesterday—that I might as well have been at home in bed all day instead of out in the pouring rain.

Despite my possible wasted day yesterday, I just I couldn’t go out again today. All along, I’d been planning to take Friday off so I could get ready to go to Managua on Saturday and meet Rob at the airport. This morning I helped out Joel (the English teacher, who is actually French-Canadian) with the kids. Wow, if these kids manage to learn any English, it will be a miracle. The entire class was a total cacophony of all 5 students shouting and giggling at the same time, throwing back and forth their notebooks and pencils. After class, we went over to the garden to teach the kids English names for the vegetables. It was a jumbled procession of cart-wheeling kids, who were climbing all over each other, over us, and up in the Guayabo trees to pick fruits. You wouldn’t think a simple walk in the garden would be fraught with danger, but about a dozen times, Eduardo did something (like balance on a precariously thin Guayabo branch) that make my heart catch in my throat as I shouted, “Eduardo, cuidado!” Most of the kids stayed after that, and I took some pictures. Kids here are endlessly fascinated with cameras. After I had taken a few photos of them, they each wanted to take pictures of me, of each other, of themselves. The result is a lot of blurry images, but we had fun.

Meli and Professor Joel with the students. Eduardo is on the far right, next to Joel.



More pictures of the kids at the dock


Eduardo, balancing precariously over the water and making me nervous

Tomorrow I’m off to Managua to meet Rob. At long last, we’ll be having visitors too. Rob’s brother Andy and his wife Kimberly are flying in on Sunday, and we’re going to travel for a few days with them. I am definitely looking forward to this!! I will take lots of pictures of our adventures. Thanks for reading.