5:00 am. Wake up to the sounds of roosters crowing and my neighbor cutting firewood. Crawl out from under my mosquito net. Stumble up the hill to the latrine.
5:15 am. As soon as I hear my neighbor making tortillas, set out for a run.
6:00 am. Back from my run, go to my neighbor’s house to fill up buckets with water for the day. make oatmeal and tea for breakfast.
6:30 am. Water my garden, weed, take care of my plants, maintain my compost pile, sweep my house and my patio, and straighten things up around the house.
7:30-10 am. Hammock time. Read books, write in my journal, kick around ideas for the novel I want to write, come up with blog posts, do Sudoku puzzles, listen to my ipod, play my guitar, think about projects I might do in my community.
10 am. Now that it’s good and hot, it’s time for the water sports. Go up the hill to my former host family’s house and bucket bathe. Then do whatever laundry I have. I find it’s easier to keep up with it if I do it every couple of days instead of letting it pile up. I also hand wash my shoes, a practice I intend to keep up once I return to the US.
11:00 am. Lunch – either beans, rice, and tortillas at my host family’s house or whatever I can whip up using my propane stove. Yesterday it was whole wheat pasta with peanut sauce and Swiss chard from my garden. Sometimes my next door neighbor gives me an egg or two if her chicken has laid that day.
12-3 pm. More hammock time.
3-5 pm. This is when I do the bulk of my actual work, since this is when people are available to meet. If there are no meetings scheduled then I go around and visit people. This involves a lot of sitting around and talking about the weather – it hasn’t rained in way too long, and all the producers are worried about it – a lot of super-sweet and very weak coffee, and a lot of sweet bread and corn cookies. Sometimes there is corn on the cob, but that is trailing off.
5:30 pm. Dinner. (See Lunch)
6-7 pm. Hang out with my host family.
7-8 pm. I’m trying to get into the new soap opera, Rastro de Analia (Analia’s Face), since my whole host family – aunts, uncles, grandparents, siblings – watch it every night. But the plot is pretty cheesy. Basically Analia is a sexy undercover spy who is trying to get even with the people who killed her lover. There are a lot of costume changes into ever more revealing dresses that show off Analia’s fake boobs and long legs. They should probably call the show something else, because the chick’s face is definitely not the focus.
8 pm. Go back to my little house and read in bed until I fall asleep.
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