Check out my awesome daily schedule.

6:30 Get up and eat a breakfast of fresh bread and fresh out of the cow cheese with a cup of
warm milk and a tid bit of coffee and a heaping spoonful of sugar.
7:00 Walk around town with the Grandma of my house for 20 minutes because the doctor
advised her to do this because of her cholesteral level.
7:20 Sit in my back yard....let me explain my backyard....It has banana trees, and other fruit
trees, beyond that it is fields of sugar cane and behind that mountains......I sit in my
backyard and read Harry Potter, in Spanish
8:00 I study for the GRE for an Hour.
9:oo I work in the school until school is out.
12:oo Lunch...3 plates 1st rice and goat, 2nd ceviche 3rd soup, way too much food
1:00 Siesta
3:00 Play soccer
6:oo Dinner
7:00 I hang out with the women of the family, (grandma, aunt and mom) joking around until
bed time
9-10:00 bed time.

I don't know if this schedule sounds awesome or totally lame to you guys, but I think it is pretty sweet, and I don`t think I ever want to readjust to the USA lifestyle.

Distressed--- I was sick this weekend with my yearly bronchitus. I called the Doctor got amoxycillan and figured that is that. I know the drill. I will take my pills and wait it out. Not the case. My family decided it was their personal responsability to take care of me. They decided that the reason that I was sick was because I slept with the window open and I caught a cold. It is at least 90 degrees out, and I live in an adobe house. (Adobe traps heat making it alot hotter,) However i´ll be flexible and say that maybe their right about that. There resolution, though, does not fit the cause. They decidided that I am never allowed to have the window open, not even in the day. They had my cousin Joanna sleep with me to make sure that I did not throw off my blankets in the middle of the night, and I was only allowed to drink hot water. All this in 90 degree heat. I have never sweated so much in my life. My host mom entered my room every night to rub vicks vapor rub on my chest and back. She was worried. I was coughing all night every night. understandable. However the last night she decided to use some of the remedys her mother tought her . First she put vicks vapor rub in boiling water to make the air smell like it. good idea, right. The list goes on. Then she decided to rub the Vicks vapor rub all over the newspaper and then light a candle. She slowly carressed the flame over the newspaper, heating the vicks, and also spilling wax onto the newspaper. Then she stuck the scalding newspater to my back and chest and told me not to remove it until the morning. To say the least I am better, but I feel like my personal space has been seriously challenged.
Times like this I wonder what I am doing. On a positive note, I am better.

ERin

My community Batan Grande

The terrain is super dry, but surprisingly there is alot of vegatation, kind of reminescent of Taos, New MExico. There is one cement road with a chain of pastel boxy, attached houses on either side. Other then that there is not really a road but houses dispersed randomly around the pueblo. on the outer rim of the town you see crops extending to the horizon, and beyond that mountains. You can walk through the town at 9:00 in the morning and then again at 6:00 at night and you will see the same old folks sitting outside their houses, not haven moved an inch. It is a typical small town, as the people here say, pueblo pequeno, infierno grande. small town, big hell. everybody knows everybody´s business. The good thing is that since it is such a small town, things such as abandoned children in the streets just dont exist. The mother of my house has taken in one child because her father refused to recognize her as his, and the grandmother took in another, for the same reason. In other words children are abandoned, but they are soon absorbed into another families. The odd thing about this is that it is such a small town that you see the real fathers pass by on the sidewalk and pretend not to recognize the children, when the children are just looking at them dead in the eye, whispering among the adopted family or to me, "That is my father. He is a bad man." or "that is the wife of my father, she is a bad women." My back hurts from typing.