Wish I would've won some dishes

It has been a very busy couple of days! On Monday night I helped the family cut the little tails off the end of pea pods. They had SO many bags of pea pods to do and the whole family helped – it’s for a company called Fruitesca that exports vegetables to the US and Europe, so if you see it in the grocery store you should buy it! I really wanted to take a shower so Juanita heated a big pot of water on the stove for me for which I was very grateful (yes that is really how I bathe here).

On Tuesday, Odilia, her mother-in-law who lives next door, Lupita (the youngest), and I went to “dia de la familia” (family day) at the youngest kids’ school. Some of the kids were in acts or sang songs but it was mostly audience participation (mom, you would have hated it!) The prize was always a package of 2 or 3 dishes, which I found funny. It was sad when they would ask 4 fathers to come up to participate in a game or competition and it would take ten minutes or even more to come up with the 4 dads – in one of the activities a male teacher had to participate because they could only get 3 dads to come up. It’s not that they were shy, it’s that there were probably only 5 dads in the crowd of 300. It should have been called “day of the mothers and younger siblings while the dads go to work or stay home.” During one of the acts I got pulled onto the “stage” from the front row by a 4^th or 5^th grader who told me a pick-up line. Everyone laughed but I only smiled because I didn’t get it… and returned to my seat! Odilia won some dishes for her impression of a dog, but didn’t win the competition for having the most children. The woman with 14 kids won those dishes.

Odilia, Santos, and all the little kids went to yet another church service after the school program – the 3^rd one in less than 72 hours. I decided to stay home and watched Hugo dubbed in Spanish instead (very good movie!). That’s when my stomach started rumbling… both Odilia and one of her daughters told me my stomachache was from the cold. It was cold and raining a lot, but I secretly think it started to hurt from the new bacteria I had been ingesting with my food since I got here. When Odilia got back from church, she made me some herbal tea for my stomachache and apparently told me to drink the tea and wait ten minutes before eating my dinner, but I didn’t hear her. When she saw I had mixed the two, she told me I would vomit. I guess I wasn’t listening because she had gotten a call that Petronila, one of our patients, was in labor!