March 6th

MOVING

Yesterday I ran into Gina, the woman we has practically adopted me here in my town, and she informed me that she and her entire family were moving- today. She said they got a great opportunity to open a store and live in a bigger house and so they’re taking it. Thankfully the town is only about 40 km away, not too bad. So, today we all loaded into the back of an open bed truck with their things and went to see and clean the new house. The day in and of itself was normal- sweeping, washing, arranging, fixing- but some things I found pretty different. In the states, when you help someone move or clean up a house, you typically work and then order pizza or take out or something. Here they don’t have that luxury. When we got to the house, I was sent with one of the daughters to start preparing launche (snake time). We had to set up the grill, track down carvao (charcoal), buy bread, boil water, and clean dishes (note- the stove and dishes we brought with us). As we were doing those things we started preparing lunch. This is still at about 8:30 in the morning. So, we gut the fish (we’d brought with us), clean them, peel potatoes, cut tomatoes, fry the fish, cook the rice... I sat cooking lunch with two other girls for almost 4 hours. I wasn’t allowed to help clean (still not sure why) and to be honest I pretty much just watched them cook. At about 1:30 the rest of the family (4 adults and several kids) calmed down and we had lunch. After, we cleaned dishes, threw out the used carvao, and loaded everything back up into the truck. The thing that I find amusing- I thought we were taking all that stuff to their new house, to get things started, and I was there to help clean. Apparently I was just an extra set up eyes to make lunch and everything in the back of the truck was to prepare a meal for 10 people (6 of whom didn’t help clean). Quite the production if you ask me!!