Lizards in the Bathtub

In my quest to acquire new friends i neglected to recognize those that i share the same living space with! (How pathetic does that sound?) Umberto is a lizard who has half a tail and lives in my bathtub. It took me by surprise the first couple times, but now its a welcome sight. He is always there....he is my rock....this is getting weird.

Today Rosalia and I explored a new village. I have been waiting for the clinic administrator to take me around to the different rural clinics in the area and introduce me to the medical staff, but she is never around, so I decided to "cold call" this particular clinic. The community is called Valle Nuevo and it is super far our there, as if i weren't already far enough. It is a village that survives on subsistence farming, there is no electricity and the only water the collect falls from the sky. It is quite beautiful. I am sure they do not necessarily see it that way, but for me it is a slice of paradise.

No radios, tv's, cell phones absolutely nothing. It was so quiet. You could close your eyes and just hear the wind, and birds chirping and the sound of machete on sugarcane. It is my new favorite place on earth (maybe a little much?). Pictures don't do it justice.

Anyways, I went into the clinic and met with the two female Haitian (whhaaatt??) doctors. They were very nice and welcoming. A nice woman named Rita, afterwards, approached me and said she was a health promoter in the community. We spoke for a while about her work with World Vision (bllahh), and i was able to see a few of the documents and census that she did for them......FIMRC is waayyy better :) Our diagnostic is so much more detailed and telling. Ill get off my soap box. Long story short, her son invited me into the field and gave me a piece of fresh cut sugarcane (you bite a chunk off, suck the sugar out of it then spit out the rind) then Rita invited me to have lunch with them (which i can never refuse, shameless). We had rice and beans with what they could only describe as ave (bird).
"What kind of bird?" I said
" You know the kind that flies?" Ritas son (Chiche) says.
Blank stare, "So, is it like chicken, or rooster or hen or bald eagle?" Said I.
"No it is the kind you see in the tree then poww with a rock!" Says Chiche with pride.

So, i ate the mystery bird (which tasted similar to guinea fowl, mom) and it wasn't till later i realized what i had eaten was a pigeon.

Yeeeaaaa.

In other news: We are preparing for our first community diagnostic this weekend. I have been training 15 community members from El Carrizal to assist in a health census. Tomorrow is the final meeting and Saturday we begin! It will be interesting to see how this turns out. This is my first experience with this kind of thing, so we shall see. We should have (if everything goes perfectly according to plan) 160 homes surveyed by Sunday afternoon.

Wish us luck!