And God said “let there be light.” And there was light. And the gringo and his family saw(italicized) that it was good. Holy Monday.

I think that is already the second pun I have used in this blog and I think they both pertained to light, so I’ll stop now (I may or may not be turning into Uncle Paul). Anyway, we got a solar panel from my host Dad’s brother on Easter because he moved from his house and then a light bulb on Monday so I have electricity for a few hours a night now. The battery does make a really annoying buzzing noise though when it is low on juice. We also got a radio, a telephone, and a new oven, so I am basically living like a king now.

The last week or so has been very busy. We had Good Friday through Holy Monday off and we spent the whole weekend more or less hanging out with the family. On Thursday night though I came home from the library to find my kids playing baseball with a hacky-sack for a ball, firewood for a bat, and more firewood for bases, of which there were 5. The kids had no idea why there were 5 bases, there just were, so I went with it and we ended up playing till it got dark when I went and got my flash and continued playing by the light of my flash. Since then we have upgraded to using only 4 bases and using rubber boots, rocks, and buckets for them and a whiffle ball for the ball. We still use firewood for the bat. We have also gotten our li naeb’ (moms) to play and we have games with like 7 people on each team and have been doing that the last few nights.

Other than baseball over the long weekend we had a very nice Easter. On Saturday night Darrell and I got eggs and dye to color eggs with the kids. We then made some tamales the rest of the night. On Sunday morning we woke up early and had the kids find the eggs and then ate them for breakfast. Afterwards, our two families went to the river to do laundry, swim, and eat the tamales.  It was a very busy and fun weekend.

 The eggs.

 Searching...

 Searching... notice the egg in the window right above their heads.

Oh!!!! I found it!!!

I will now take a moment to talk about critters and diseases and such here. Other than eb’ li xook and eb’ li chilan I think my next least favorite animal here may be the howler monkey (max, pronounced mash). For being so small they are very loud very early in the morning. Besides these bigger animals you have ants. I don’t recall ever being bitten by an ant in Wisconsin, but here they are tiny and bite all the time. They don’t just ruin your picnic; they ruin your whole day. And then you get to mosquitos, which are probably the worst living thing in the world. Here they carry dengue (which from our talk about it by a local doctor seems like a nasty disease) and two strands of malaria. We do take pills malaria pills every week so hopefully I will not get that at least.  I do feel like a huge wuss though because I take malaria pills and have a mosquito net and no one else who actually lives here has any of that stuff. Besides mosquitos there is the bot fly, which I know some of you were concerned about. Don’t worry though, you do not have to worry about the fly themselves, but rather once again you have to worry about the mosquitoes.  The bot fly is fairly ingenious; it lays its eggs so perfectly on the underbelly of a mosquito that the egg does not affect their flight at all. Then, when a mosquito lands on you to suck your blood, there is a heat-sensing trap door on the bottom of the egg that opens up when the heat from your body hits it. The larva then drops out and digs into your skin where it proceeds to eat away at you and grow inside you. You then have to first suffocate it before you can force it out.

Max. I can't lie to all you fine people, I took this photo at the zoo.

Other than all these things you also have to worry about parasites and bowel movements. To help us better understand this we had a whole session on diarrhea. Nurse Jackie gave us all these guidelines to when you need to contact her because you need help. I will not get into too much detail but I will leave you some pictures that I think will help paint a better picture.

 I think this is pretty self-explanatory. 

 The incredible, wonderful Nurse Jackie. Here she is with the chart and matching play-doh examples. I don't think I need to give you guys anymore information on this topic, just know that I had about a 3 hour session on it.