Charlie Brown Christmas

I am horrible about updating this blog and there are no excuses. So here it goes, my life from November to now in a nutshell.

For Thanksgiving I went to Las Vegas, Santa Barbara and there a group of volunteers and I made a dinner to celebrate. It was alot of fun and really good food.

For World AIDS day we had an event in town but I ended up helping out a friend and was a God mother for a day at the 6th grade graduation of a girl in one of the villages. Its a long story but needless to say I missed the event that I had helped plan, but in the end I still did something good!

Before Christmas World Vision has a party to celebrate and this year they took everyone to Tela for the weekend. It was alot of fun. We stayed at a resort and ended up being like cabanas. Me and my site mate Anna shared what was appeared to be an apartment together. It was a good time and we got to plan on the beach. For Christmas this year I stayed in Morazan and spent the holiday with my old host family. It was a good time, I definately got a bit homesick but all in all it was nice. Hondurans celebrate Christmas a bit different here. It seems to be all about the food. We had oven roasted chicken, tomales, fruit cocktail and thats about it... but we ate if for a week straight. And the funny thing is that every house makes the exact same thing. So you spend the day getting ready for the night and no one eats until Midnight.. oh yeah and all of this happens on Christmas Eve, the 25th is actually not that celebrated. On the 25th I just ate and slept mostly.. haha!! For New Years I went to Yorito to spend that time with Cesar and his family. Again this holiday is not celebrated like we do in the states. It appears that everything here is about the food. We had tamales again and alot of homemade bread. At midnight some kids set of firecrackers but they were definately not the pretty kind and no one did a count down or anything. I actually didn't even realize it was midnight until 12:30 because there was nothing big. I ended up spending that whole week with him there and was able to get to know his family really well. One day we went up into the mountains into a community about 5 hours or so away. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, but of course dumb ole me forgot my camera because I just didn't realize what we were going to do.

In January everything started to get back to normal and slowly but surely the work is picking up. I am now working steadily trying to weigh and measure the children in eight commuunities but it is no easy task we are talking about a lot of kids for just me to handle.

Cesar and I also got two puppies and he decided to name them Hillary and Monica. It was too funny for me to change the names. Right now they are both at my house but I hope that this week he will take one with him to his house and the other will stay with me. When we first got them they were not well taken care of. They both had skin problems and patches of fur missing, along with ticks and fleas and worms... it was such a fun time those first few weeks. Now they are doing so much better, we bought special shampoo and medicine for parasites. The pot bellies have finally left and they are adorable.

Some sad news to report. One man that worked in my office had a stroke last week (at least that is what I understand to have happened) and he had to have brain surgery. The way I understand it, it is going to cost over 400,000 Lempiras or about $25,000, that might not sound like too much but we are talking about a third world country where the majority of people will never see that much in their entire life. Everyone is donating money to help pay for the bills and he had the surgery 2 days ago and the doctor said he should recover just fine.

Another Nicole moment happened last week. I fell off of my front steps on my way to clean up dog poop and ended up spraining my ankle. Needless to say it was not fun and my counterpart ended up taking me to some old guy and he "massaged" my foot and then began to twist it in ways that is just not right. I have never screamed so loud in my life. But after that Peace Corps sent me to a specialist and they took xrays. It is not fractured but definately a good story to tell!!!!

So that is all for me as of right now. Keep the emails coming.