Day 201.

So sorry about the lack of posting this week -- I have been having incredible technical difficulties that just love to make life hard. My power cord is now working a whopping 17% of the time and the letters K and I on my keyboard no longer function. Wahoo.

Let me give you a little re-cap of what I've done as of late:

-Watched Nazareth's eyes open fiercely as something inside of her moved. I don't really remember my mom's pregnancy with Luke or Henry, so this is really the most I've been around a pregnant woman (pregnant girl?). It's been such an experience to be explaining negative integers one minute and then reminding Naza to breathe the next.
-Saw my beloved Karen have a well-deserved meltdown. On Thursday Karen spent the class with her head on her desk; she's a hard worker so I let her take a nap. At the end of the lesson though, one of the other girls told me that Karen wasn't sleeping, but crying. Her overwhelming life was catching up to her -- taking care of her two-year-old sister-in-law, caring for her own child as she learns to walk, visiting her sister in rehab when their own mother refuses to, trying to stdy for her tests which are rapidly approaching...she is such a strong young woman and the tears and the anguish I saw on her face were not her own; they were the gutteral sobs of Christ aching for his beloved creation. She hurts for others. I want to learn how to do that.
-Visited another one of my student's house. They had fumigated that day, so as I walked in, I saw fifteen of the largest cockroaches I have ever laid my eyes on. Her four-year-old daughter was playing with them.
-Spent the night in Carpio on Friday night with Alanna, Kayla (a new volunteer from Vancouver, BC), Carmen's three sons, their best friends Rudy and Pate, and Rudy's cousin Oscar (a boy who lived in Maryland for four years, started getting in trouble, and then was sent to live with his aunt and uncle in Carpio. So logical -- your kid is making bad decisions, so of course you're going to send him to the gang-infested ghetto of Costa Rica. It's actually working out really great for him). We watched District 9, played jump rope for a solid two hours, and ate a hearty meal of rice and frozen chicken patties. There were nine of us. We had four plates, two cups, no serving utensils, and a machete the size of my leg.
-Yesterday my host mom and dad took me on a paseo or day trip. We decided to try out the new highway that was just completed in January after twenty years in the making. It took us a little over an hour to get to the beach where I tried cashew fruit, candied papaya and pineapple, and thoroughly enjoyed a Puntarenas Churchill -- shaved ice doused in a sickly sweet red syrup, sweetened condensed milk, ice cream, and evaporated milk. YUM.

This week, I...

saw a dead monkey on the side of the road.

missed my bed that fits my feet.

realized I am going to miss listening to my host dad sing along to worship songs with a falsetto voice on long car rides.

learned where the apostraphe button is on my host fam's Spanish keyboard.

smiled when I realized I've been here for over 200 days.

-Hannah