I really love it when I read outside my house. I may go out with the intent on reading, but I am able to get maybe 2 pages under my belt. I usually end up spending most of my time saying hello to people who are walking down the street or talking with whatever family member who is sitting outside at the same time. But if I;m lucky my four-year old cousin Ulysis is sitting outside playing with rocks or sticks or something. Ulysis loves to a. color b. cry and c. tell stories. My favorite is the last one. He knows two stories by heart- Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs and has told me many versions of them both. However, Ulysis has a pretty significant lisp and I usually need a translator to understand him (for instance, when trying to say ¨finger¨ he pronounces it as ¨fart¨ which at times, can make for interesting conversations.
So today I was just sitting outside when I heard Ulysis crying in his house for whatever reason. So I walked over, picked him up and gave him the book I was reading (Indian Summer by Alex von Tunzelman- (great book and thanks to the Cady family for a. Their great taste in literature and b. For lending it to me) and asked him to tell me a story. Immediately he jumped into telling me about the big bad wolf eating grandma and having huge teeth and what not while I tried not to laugh at how adorable he was, pretending to read my book out loud with a serious lisp.
This week in general has been busy- lots of meetings with health promoters and community families. Today, I went to advise some of the families that there was a meeting today in the health post about hygiene. So I walked over to my annex town called Tacural to seek out two families. I had completely forgotten where one of the families lived and the other I knew lived around the soccer field somewhere off in the middle of nowhere. After searching for the soccer field for 30 minutes on back paths covered with trash and by dirty water canals I came back right to where I started walking huffing and puffing. I had done a full circle. If that wasn´t annoying enough, a lady stopped me in the road and asked me if I was scared walking around alone. I said no, why to which she replied ¨Oh well, because you know that crazy man with AIDS was heard to be walking around the cemetery last night with a dirty needle, sticking people.¨ Now, I have heard this rumor for the past week and so have my comrades in their sites so I believe it to be false but nevertheless, I got a little more anxious walking around those back-road paths looking for these far-out houses.
Okay, so I finally found the house- sitting perched atop a giant sand hill and banged on the door and yelled until a girl my age came and let me in after realizing I wasn;t the ¨crazy guy¨ running around. So I chatted it up with her and said hello to her two-year old boy which I always forget and refer to him as a girl and convinced them to come to the hygiene talk.
Twenty minutes later, I had found the second house which sat on a taller and steeper sand-hill and talked with the mom (4 years my junior) and her baby and tried (albeit unsuccessfully) to convince them to come too. To top off my journey, I managed to slip, fall and go down the majority of the hill on my butt. I´m pretty sure the mom saw everything but heaven forbid she say anything- woof.
On a completely different note- I would like to inform you all of some sunbathing advice I was given the other night at dinner (since it is summer after all). Applying coke (the soda, not the drug) to your skin and smearing it on acts as baby oil and serves as a great tanner. Coming from a family with a long, long history of skin cancer, this sounded like the most absolutely ridiculous and maybe dumbest advice i`ve ever heard. Putting baby oil on is bad enough, but coke? For real? Talk about a hightened stickiness factor slash direct absorption of those chemicals into the skin (although I`m sure the absorption through the intestinal lining isn’t a whole lot better). Anyways, so yeah, go stick that in your back pocket.
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