Hey Blondie

I do quite a bit of walking in a day and as I walk by there´s lots of english phrases shouted at me often by little children, hello, goodbye, whatisyourname (yes, all one word) and in a country where not many people speak english I´m amazed that the phrase ¨hey blondie¨ is remembered and used when I walk past.
Let´s see....another week down and more and more spanish is being absorbed into my head, I´m often finding myself waking up and talking to myself in Spanish, that´s a good sign right?! I´m feeling like I´ve done quite a bit of improving over the short 3 weeks that I´ve been in country, but I still catch myself utterly bewildered when my host sister gives me the benefit of the doubt and rambles on way too quickly in Spanish, like I´m a native speaker. But she´s good at noticing my confused look and stops herself, slows down and repeats words sometimes to many times to count.
Things are moving along quite well and we´re actually starting to get our hands dirty, literally. We had a gardening charla/training last week and I helped build a garden. Grandma - if you´ve figured out how to read my blog yet, I may actually return from this experience and want to help you weed your garden instead of considering it cruel, slave labor- we´ll see.
We´ll be building our own gardens at the elementary school this Saturday and I really hope that we have lots of little hands to help us, otherwise I´m going to have my work cut out for myself. I´m feeling more confident in our ability to gather children for our groups and projects have are super successful youth group meetings!
We had a meeting on Monday, which 11 students showed up to, way better than our first attempt and one that we were all proud of; but it gets even better. We had another meeting on Tuesday and.....drumroll please.....22 students showed up!!! Woo Hoo! And I´m kicking myself for not carrying my camera with me every minute of the day, luckily Hannah brought her camera and I´ll steal the photos to post because I´m super proud and want to show off our creative students. Our goal for the youth group is to create a product out of recycled materials, so has an introduction we had the students collect trash, which can be found all over the streets, and make something that could potentially be used in the bathroom. The students were so creative, I was amazed. They made toilet paper holders, toothbrush holders, flower pots, fly swatters....I promise I´ll post the photos. We also decided on our big recycled project which is......another drumroll......a playhouse for children made from plastic bottles and other materials. This is a super huge project, but the students seem really excited about it and so are all of the aspirantes (trainees/not yet volunteers). I´ve thrown my camera into my bag and am now going to carry it around all the time, so I promise to take lots of photos and post them occasionally to show progress.
Hm....that´s the really big news for me this week. Wait! I got my cell phone finally!! so if I haven´t texted you already and you´d like my number email or facebook me. I was super excited to actually talk to my mom this week, even though it was only for a few minutes.
And I have to get going because it´s almost 6pm and it´s truly like clock work here...sunrise 6am, sunset 6pm. Before I leave I´m going to give one last plea for mail...a postcard, letter, package, anything would be greatly appreciated. I´m the only one of the 4 trainees that haven´t received any mail yet, it´s gotten to the point that Emily a trainee promised to send me a letter. C´mon people!