Sunday, December 31, 2006

Getting my house ready


This is a sample of the traditional bag the sell in my site. This artisan group just received money from and NGO to build a house to sell, and distribute the wares.

This is my buddy Jose Carlos. I like him because he´s cute, nice and has my own name. He has been really sick recently and not had any appetite. What he does eat he usually throws up. He also has much skin peeling off his legs and arms. It looks like his legs are dirty but thats what it actually is. I think he has a vitamin deficiency and some sort of stomach parasite. If anyone else wants to diagnose feel free.


After I had set up my bed, mosquito net, all my clothes, and put up wall decorations, I found out that MINSA, the ministry of health is coming to Valle to spray every house for Malaria. This meant that I had to take everything out of my house, so the guys could come in and spray down the walls. A year the was a Malaria outbreak, and now every 3 months they come to fumigate the houses, until the community tests completely negative for Malaria.

Me with a friend's pet parrot.

The fumigating man, and my 75 cent Panama hat.

For new years the burn a doll, I´m not exactly sure why but I know its a tradition.

Here is the label of the fumigant, kinda scary stuff, but at least I don´t have mosquitoes in my house. I heard before they sprayed, ants were everywhere in houses, and the mosquitoes were much worse. Now there are rarely any mosquitoes, only at dusk by the swamp. Below is the residue left over from spraying, you can see where a piece of paper was on the ground.

Now that I am no longer sharing my house with the teacher, I have started making some improvements. There was a bunch of lumber and palm fronds to build a new rood being stored under my house. I moved them further under my house so no you can hang out below my house, and play marbles, are a number of other games. While moving all this material we found several animals. First 2 rats ran out from underneath.


This duck had made its home, under the palm fronds and was sitting on all her eggs. We moved her and the eggs to a new house under the new pile of wood.
This huge toad was also under there.

There are several of the land crabs that live in mud and eat insects.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Did you realy burn the doll on New Year's Day? Maybe it is a way to rid the old year, cleanse it!
Happy New Year, Joe!
Love,
Mom

Anonymous said...

JOE!!!!! Happy Freakin birthday man!!! One more year, and you're into the Jack Bauer club!!! haha Hope your day was awesome. From the blog, it looks like things are going well! Talk to ya soon man, and see you in August??
-Slash

p.s. you were right, i passed the FE!

Anonymous said...

Happy Birthday Joe!!! I've been following the blog, sounds like you've been having an awesome time. I tried calling you last night, but somehow I couldn't get through. I'll try again soon. I'm working on a letter to send to you. Hope all is well.

-Justin

Unknown said...

Yo dude i just wanted to say what up and even though i'm not sure how often you check this thing i figured its got to be good to hear from people back home. So last night i posed the question to my roomie Bobby about the epic battle royale between the snake/bear/turtle/elephant/tiger/croc. Bobby agreed with me that the tiger would dominate and then we embarked on a google video hunt to see if there was any evidence. Much to my surprise there was tons! Croc vs tiger, bear vs panther (a suitable replacement for the tiger) elephant with some dude with a stick vs tiger and several others. No surprising to me was how the tiger ran the table and dominated all competitors. He tore this croc to shreds in like 15 seconds. Gotta love the internet right? So hope all is well and that you dont have some crazy disease and have fun with that machete.