Monday, January 23, 2006

Recent news and travels

We are back into our routine here. Ben’s work is going ok. Not great, not bad. He is still working long hours and probably will be for the rest of the time that we are here. Two interesting things from work: it became apparent that until we have our return tickets purchased (which hasn’t happened yet) we don’t know exactly when we’ll be coming home, and that it’s a definite possibility that he will be doing some travel to PR after our stay here is finished.

I have a couple of big projects I’d really like to get some time to work on (in addition to wishing for time to study and learn Spanish), but I usually end up spending my time doing housework (of which we have quite a bit more here – bigger house, house gets dirtier, house is harder to clean than at home) or trying to get other stuff done that we just need to do to live here. As for phone calls and arrangements (say, to get our air conditioning units cleaned, which really needs to be done), I always get the run-around, in part because I can’t speak Spanish, and in part because everything here just takes longer – no one knows, no one can give me a definite answer, and then when someone does know I have to ask a lot of questions to make sure they aren’t trying to take advantage of me!

Lily has a lot of energy all week long and training her is a non-stop job when she is awake. Her language is developing more, and that is fun. She talks all the time, and tells us in one or two word snippets some of what she is thinking. This weekend she has been reading and singing The Little Drummer Boy (a picture book with the words from the well known Christmas carol) with Ben. Something about the little boy, the drum, and the rum-pa-pum-pum really appeals to her!

Mariah has 4 teeth now – one on top and three on the bottom! She has not been sleeping well this week (until last night), maybe because of ear infections (which she had this past week) or teeth (1 just came through, 1 will come soon). She really likes to play with Lily. She’s always crawling along behind her and trying to play where Lily plays. She also seems to have a special need for “mommy time”.

Saturday we went to Guayama and near-by Aguirre on the southern part of the island. Guayama is the town where Ben works. Casa Cautano is in Guayama, an old house (just over 1oo years) preserved in amazing condition with the original furnishings. It was the home of the founder of Guayama, and his family lived there for 3 or 4 generations and then the house was given to the municipality. We'll post some pictures from the house later. There is an old sugar cane mill in Aguirre, and although it’s not in operation (I would have liked to see the processing operation), there were some interesting houses in Aguirre which used to be (and some still are) owned by mill employees. The style of architecture is different from a lot of what we see here. We’ll post a couple of pictures.

Near Aguirre is an estuary, and we took a short hike through a mangrove forest on the edge of the estuary. The road to the forest was a dirt path - literally - not often traveled and we were the only ones there at the time. Unlike the Florida mangrove forests where I think you need a boat, we could hike through this one. Maybe that was because this is the "dry" season? Two interesting sitings: fiddler crabs (which I used while I worked at Purdue, but had never seen in a natural environment) and neumatophores – special roots that mangroves poke out of the soil for gas exchange. This is necessary because the salinity of the soil doesn’t allow an adequate oxygen supply. We took the long way home and saw some great views of the ocean from the roadside (minus the decomposing skull – dog? – that was also on the roadside next to the great view of the ocean).

Sunday did not bring us much good news from local friends: an older lady is in a grave health situation, another friend had discouraging news from her recent surgery, another girl was missing because of side effects from chemo, and our best friends David and Karen (David has done some - really most - of the translating for us at church) are moving to MI in a couple of weeks (all this in a church of about 50 people). We are really going to miss David and Karen and their boys; our last couple months here will be more lonely without them. We are excited that they are going to MI, and we hope to be able to visit them when we get back to IN. Their kids are also Lily’s favorite playmates at church.

That's it for now - check out the recent pictures (above post) from our trip this weekend.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home