maybe i could inject bug spray intravenously

i am so sick of mosquitoes. i think one of my incredibly personal secondary project here will be to start the war of the mosquitoes. they fight all guerilla style and i am gonna walk in with my deet and bug bomb the daylights out of them. that's the plan at least. i would be a hero...

anyway sorry for the delayed post, i have been very busy and important. well, the busy part is true. we have youth groups formed and it has taken a lot of work to throw together a project with them in the short amount of time we had left. that said, i am very excited about the project we have created. it's gonna be a night of merengue when the jovenes will talk about the history of merengue, read poems they have written, talk about the traditional clothing, and read a biography of a famous merengue artist, fernando villalona. and they are gonna dance. we somehow ended up with the leader of a local dance club in our youth group, so he got all of his friends in our youth group and what was a 4-5 person youth group became 12-14. it's gonna be great, they are fantastic dancers! and the best part is that all their stuff is already choreographed so we didn't have to worry about preparing that part of the presentation. the other cool part is that the volunteers are just supervisors and the jovenes do most of the visible work. i mean, we wrote the letter to the mayor and i stalked him until we thought he would be in his office (its really hard to actually catch him in the office--the mayors here spend a lot of time out in the town and in santo domingo) so we could deliver our letter requesting space for our presentations. and he said yes! so we do a lot of the background work, but the kids are the ones taking the reigns on the projects. i am very proud of our kids. also there is one, Adolfo, who is an aspiring writer which makes me so happy. yesterday another volunteer, Alex, and i spent hours typing up some of Adolfo's stories so he can have hard copies. there are computer labs here, but you have to pay to use them, so Adolfo just had a giant folder of all his hand-written stories and a memory stick that our jefe had given him. just reading his stories, and understanding what i could, was interesting. he has a very strong voice, and his stories almost sounded like fables. he has a very strong writing style and i hope he keeps writing because i think he could really be successful. we are going to teach him how to set up a blog today so he can "publish" his stories for free, and if he does end up doing it i will post the link here. but i'm not sure if he will be able to, because, like i said, the computer labs aren't free and if he couldn't use them to type up his stories, i doubt he can to update a blog.

Let's see, what else...OH we went to the beach last weekend! it's the first time i had been to the beach since coming here and holy cow it was awesome. first of all, we were all pretty stressed from the week and working ourselves so hard with our jovenes, so we kind of had this unspoken agreement to check all peace corps related anything at the door and just enjoy our time at the beach. which we so did. it was beautiful with the giant palm trees and the incredibly blue water. and the white sand. and the sand dollars. and the gentle waves. jealous yet? well get this: after the beach we went to our leader's boyfriend's land aka his coconut farm! and i ate coconut straight off the tree. now i'm not the biggest fan of coconut, but that was delicious.

The drive to the beach was also great. we were all loaded into two pickup trucks and i was in the bed of one of them with Brendan, Ben and Paul. We got jostled around quite a bit, and i have a beautiful shiner on my knee from a particularly mean speed bump, but it was the best ride ever. we went through the mountains to get to the beach (it was over a 2 hour drive on not always so very paved roads) and it was just so gorgeous. we actually all stopped to get out and take pictures once. On the ride back we had a bunch of coconuts back there with us which was an interesting experience because a bunch of bouncing coconuts can actually be a bit dangerous. we almost lost some shoes to the bouncing (which in hindsight is probably my fault for taking my shoes off...) i did develop a handy tactic for going over particularly large pot holes or bumps in the road: hop into a squat position as fast as possible so that you just bounce on your toes and don't ram your tailbone into the bed and your spine into the side every time the car bounced. winning.

Anyway it was the longest day maybe ever, but also one of the best i've had since being in the country. and that is really saying something because i've had more than my fair share of fantastic days. i do have a peeling back because, being the genius i have proven myself to be (remember the rain situation?) i forgot to put sunscreen on my back. i remembered the rest of me though! so at least the rest of me is burn free. i've actually gotten obsessed with my sunscreen because the sun is so strong here, and i've gotten so tan, that i feel like a walking warning sign for skin cancer. i've even taken to putting sunscreen on my legs which, i am not exaggerating, i have never done in my life. even when i was a kid i never put sunscreen on my legs. but now? SPF 50! i am not leaving this country looking 10 years older thanks to sun damage. no sir, not happening.

In other news i got proposed to (this is a very mild way to describe the situation). by "got proposed to" i mean this incredibly drunk man begged me to marry him and take him to the states while he was practically falling over. actually he did fall to his knees once. it was a pretty uncomfortable situation, and nothing happened, but i have never been confronted with such a persistent person before. no matter how many ways people told him to leave, he just wouldn't. so we left and that was that.

And then last night we all american-ed it up. first the girls came over to my house and we painted our nails, chatted, learned a dance from Yaazi, and threw popcorn into our mouths. that took two and half hours. Then the guys came over and we attempted to watch a movie, but the volume on my computer wasn't working out, so we listened to music (ranging from nsync to mumford and sons, what?) and played spoons with pesos instead.

So now it's sunday and so far it's been a pretty great last weekend in El Seibo!